


feel all high, and my lights are low

by getmean



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F, Genderswap, Getting Together, More tags to be added, Mutual Pining, childhood crushes, lesbian sledgefu.... rise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:55:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 44,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25690915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/getmean/pseuds/getmean
Summary: Gene's commute to work is three and a half minutes by truck, approximately. She can’t even listen toFast Carin its entirely, unless she sits in the car in the parking lot, letting Tracey Chapman’s voice wash over her.It makes tears prick at her eyes. If that’s not a succinct enough way to express how she’s feeling about returning to her home town, Gene doesn’t know another way.
Relationships: Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge
Comments: 58
Kudos: 22
Collections: Sledgefu Week 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my fill for the genderswap prompt, for sledgefu week! unfortunately i didn't manage to get the whole thing finished in time, so i'm gonna be uploading it in chapters :~) i already have a good chunk written, so will probably just upload weekly until i'm done!

The town is only a little like Gene remembers it to be.

Dusty, faded, like watching the world behind a layer of scratched plexiglass. Gene feels like she fades right into it all; her red hair the same colour as the orange evenings, her skin as wan as the faded paint on the houses she passes on her commute to work. Can she even call it a commute? Three and a half minutes by truck, approximately. She can’t even listen to _Fast Car_ in its entirely, unless she sits in the car in the parking lot, letting Tracey Chapman’s voice wash over her. 

It makes tears prick at her eyes. If that’s not a succinct enough way to express how she’s feeling about returning to her home town, Gene doesn’t know another way.

What she’s trying to say is, she’s lonely. What she’s trying to say is, it’s becoming clearer with each passing month that it’s either leave Sytwell or give up on finding a job to make her happy. Right now she works at the local library, which would probably be fine if she didn’t have a masters in ornithology and an undergrad in zoology. What she’s trying to say is, Gene feels stuck.

Sytwell is faded buildings from the sixties melting in the sun. Gene chases her reflection most evenings, wobbly and bloated in the warped glass of shop windows, her spidery shadow clambering behind her. The evening golden and slick around her, making her feel like a tiny insect caught in amber. Running is the only thing she has now that she’s static for the first time in years. Academia no longer behind to catch her whenever she falls. It’s a strange feeling, and an unwelcome one. She’s started smoking again, secretly. She’s twenty-six and worries when she switches to safe mode on her phone to watch porn.

What if the government sees? What if her _parents_ see?

Home for Gene now is a house a block from her actual childhood home; a squat bungalow ringed by a low porch, a neat front lawn giving over to vague neglect. Total inhabitants: two. Herself and her grandpa. Genie and Neil. He likes to watch the History channel, but not the real one with actual history. No, more like the one with _American Pickers_ and _Deadliest Catch_ on. 

“I’m invested in the storyline, Genie,” he insists. The sound of the TV running is so soothing to a sleepless Gene that she doesn’t even fight it anymore. It reminds her of being six, seven, sleeping over at her grandparents house with her brother making snuffling snores next to her in the twin bed they used to share. The TV running in the silence of the house, lulling her to sleep despite the strangeness of a bedroom that wasn’t hers. Her grandpa has always been a lifelong insomniac. Gene’s body seems determined to follow in his footsteps. 

Almost midnight, the house is hushed and dark save for Gene’s glowing cigarette, and the flickering video washing her room out in shades of blue and grey. She doesn’t know what she’s watching. Some old Western her grandpa must’ve taped from the TV, considering the battered anonymous box she’d slid the tape from. On the side, in scrawled marker: _Davey’s birthday ‘71_. Gene nudges at it with her foot, balanced as she is on the narrow sill above her desk. She wonders if her dad knows that his sixth birthday had gotten taped over. It’s a move that has her grandpa written all over it. 

Gene’s only really listening to the Western. Her eyes are trained on the darkness, beyond the pool of light that her desk lamp throws through her bedroom window. As she lifts her cigarette to her mouth, her silhouette on the ground does the same. From the other side of the house, Gene hears the laughter of a studio audience. A breeze stirs the trees in the backyard, stirs Gene’s cigarette smoke back into her bedroom.

“Shit,” she curses, and flaps ineffectually at the air. On the TV, someone is dying. Gene glances at it, just to see what’s happening. She’s putting off going to bed something terrible. Going to sleep means waking up in the morning, which means going to work, which means sitting idle behind a counter for eight hours before she can clock out and come home. Every day follows the same basic formula, save for weekends, where Gene swings between appreciation for the days off, and the Sunday Scaries. Saturdays are good. Saturdays are long runs and sleeping in, maybe mowing the lawn if her grandpa can convince her. Sundays are bad. Too fleeting to enjoy, with the promise of work looming just on the horizon.

Gene takes a drag from her cigarette. She’d never thought she’d have a life so predictable that she could plot it out down to each hour of the day. It’s like by moving in with her grandpa, by moving back to Sytwell, she’s aged fifty years. A year ago she’d spent the summer hiking trails on the West Coast. Now, Gene believes in the power of prune juice and re-runs of _M*A*S*H_. Her GPS watch beeps at her about her heart rate near-constantly. She’s worn one pair of running shoes down to the asphalt in her bid to find some means of release for all the vague frustration that she’s been bottling up, for lack of any better place to put it.

In the darkness, a bush rustles. Gene watches a fox run lightly across the bottom of the garden, clinging to the fence there. She envies its busyness.

Across the room, her phone lights up. The same blue glow as the TV set. Lately, Gene has been preoccupied by fantasies of taking the truck out to the middle of nowhere, finding a large body of water, and throwing the phone in. She doesn’t have to look to know it’s a goodnight text from her mom; she sends Gene a similar one nearly daily. They always seem to oscillate between gently chiding and outright manipulative. Her cigarette rasps in the silence as she takes a drag on it, burning low enough now that she can feel the heat on her fingers. She’s not into finding out which tone tonight’s text has taken just yet. 

The Western pulls her attention again. They always remind Gene of her brother; of sleeping over at their grandparents’ house as children, sharing the same bed. Edward was just that little bit older to completely resent being on the same bedtime schedule as Gene, so he used to stubbornly get up and walk around the room while Gene tried to sleep. This TV set has been languishing in the guest room well before Edward or Gene were born; dust-covered, so old that when you turn it on you can feel the static webbing the screen. Edward used to feed it whatever tape he could find and turn the volume down real low, and Gene was always scared of being caught so she’d pretend not to watch it, even though the movies fascinated her. Grown men yelling in the street, gunning each other down while pretty women watched and gasped from their balconies. Edward went through a long cowboy phase during that time period, and one that Gene supposes he’s never really emerged from, considering the whole military thing. 

She stubs the ends of her cigarette out on the underside of the windowsill, and hops down. Gene misses the years before she and her family had moved to Mobile, misses the simplicity of them. What she’d give to be worried about something as small as their grandma scolding them and bundling Edward back into bed.

When Gene goes to brush her teeth, wash her face, she lingers in the hallway that connects the back of the bungalow to the front. Toes flexing in the thick carpet, hand braced to the wall as she listens to the TV show her grandpa has probably fallen asleep in front of. Gene knows she should go in there, should scold the old man about falling asleep in his armchair, but can’t bring herself to. The bedroom that sits on the other side of the bathroom is an empty, liminal space that neither Gene nor her grandpa care to spend much time in. The smell of her gramma’s perfume seems steeped into every fibre of the room. 

The floor creaks under her foot. From the living room, her grandpa calls, “Is that you, Genie?” Voice soft and low through the dark house. Gene stands still and silent, frozen in the hall, until she hears her grandpa switch over to the late night news. It’s then that she creeps quietly back to her bedroom.

Her phone is still waiting for her, loaded with that text message. Gene ignores it, and slips into bed, eyes trained on the ceiling as she lies awake and dreads the morning. Work in eight hours. Half a Tracey Chapman song, or snatches of the radio. The text from her mom. Gene doesn’t look forward to anything, anymore. 

———

It’s a lie, really, the not-looking-forward-to-anything thing. A half-lie at best. Gene’s nightly runs are pretty much the only thing dragging her through the day recently. After dinner on weekdays, or before the sun really rises on weekends. She’s never been much of a runner, especially on the coffee-microwave-meals-cigarettes diet that took her through university. But Sytwell makes her feel so itchy she can’t do anything but move. After eight hours of sitting on her ass in Sytwell’s quiet public library, she has a lot of that bottled up frustration to work off.

“Trainin’ for a marathon, huh?” her grandpa likes to tease. Both of them know that if Gene were to run twenty-six miles in any direction, she’d find herself in another county. Sometimes, that doesn’t feel like a bad thing at all. 

And, okay. It isn’t just that she enjoys running for the dopamine boost that her brain is definitely addicted to. There’s something else to it, too. 

About five months ago, when Gene was still new to Sytwell (new being relative, of course) and new to running, she’d stopped in the street to catch her breath and double over around a stitch for a few sweaty minutes. Pretty innocuous, right? It had been a mellow, hazy evening; the setting sun throwing long shadows across the street, every single tiny flying bug in the state gathering in clouds for Gene to run into. Hot enough that she’d wished she’d brought a bottle of water with her, hot enough that the horizon still shimmered from the residual heat of the day in the distance. 

She’d been like that; doubled over, grimacing, trying hard to steady her breath, when someone had yelled, “Hey,” and then, “Hey, if you’re gonna pass out, don’t do it here.”

And Gene had righted herself too quickly, the world greying out to fine static for a second as her head swam. Face suddenly so hot with embarrassment that it prickled. Her gaze swept along the empty street behind and in front of her, curious, on-guard. Not a soul but her; tense and still panting. Then she turned her eyes towards the houses that hung over the street, their lawns overgrown and choked with weeds, littered with various kids toys and home to various cars in various states of disrepair. Gene’s eyes had skimmed along the dark faces of them before her attention snagged on something, and stuck. 

The speaker was indistinct, all folded up and over themselves in a high-backed wicker armchair. Gene remembers hearing the creak of it from the street, as the speaker shifted to ash a cigarette on the floor. The noise had been a surprise — as if until that point Gene had convinced herself that the speaker wasn’t real, wasn’t on the same plane as her. It had untangled her vocal cords, forced her shock up through her voice.

“What?” Gene had called back, embarrassed to be caught like this. “I’m not gonna pass out.”

The way the porch lamp had them backlit meant that Gene couldn’t make out their features; just a shock of dark hair, the birdlike cock of their head as they said, “Okay, then don’t.” The tone of their voice wasn’t aggressive. In fact, it was almost teasing, in such an overfamiliar way that Gene found her embarrassment deepening. Had this person seen her before? Has Gene routinely been making an ass of herself in front of them? 

“I’m sorry,” she’d said, tearing her headphones from her ears as she faced the porch. Still just toeing the line where lawn meets sidewalk. She remembers hoping that none of the neighbours were following their exchange. “Do I know you?”

The speaker’s head had tipped back as they laughed, features still indistinct. The smudge of a full mouth, of a soft nose. That hair that haloing their face. A girl? It was hard to tell. “No,” they’d said, and Gene watched the tip of their cigarette flare. The amusement made the whole scene even worse; Gene’s face had been red for reasons beyond exertion. And she’d expected them to say something else, so she’d lingered awkwardly as the pause grew and grew — but that was it. Gene had felt the speaker’s eyes on her the whole way down the block. 

Ever since then, Gene’s been running that same stretch of town in the hopes of repeating the encounter. 

She’s not sure why. By all accounts, the interaction between her and that person had been awkward; something to remember at odd moments of the day and cringe at. And for the first couple months after it had happened, Gene avoided that block of houses like the plague. She was too new to town, too unsure about where she even fit into her grandpa’s home to consider anybody outside of her own bubble. Her runs changed route, and she spent more time on the trails that border the town, knowing she’d never encounter a soul if she stuck to the routes she knew. The green canopy of the woods overhead, the smell of soft earth and broken foliage in her nose. Better than running on hot, endless sidewalks, no destination in mind but the place she’d started out from. 

Four months in, Gene had gotten lonely. Work friends were out of the question, considering the fact that she was the youngest by a good twenty years. Reconnecting with old childhood friends was just as helpless an option: it had been the nineties when her family had moved to Mobile, and Gene had hardly been about to start writing letters to other sixteen year olds. No, it was just her and her grandpa, and looked like it might be the two of them indefinitely, unless Gene did something.

Gene’s idea of doing something, apparently, was compulsively running the same block every night for about two months. 

It’s an exaggeration. Most of the time she still takes her runs down on the trails, but if its rained, or if she’s feeling in a particularly strange mood, she’ll take the route into the middle of town. Sytwell is sprawling, for all its smallness. Everything far apart but not adding up to much if you were to take it and compact it. Since Gene and her family had moved away, it seems to have only gotten smaller. Everything orbits the town square, home to a few faded storefronts and an old, dry fountain that kids skateboard in. Houses span out from there, until they hit either the trails or the train tracks, and stop. Gene lives on the trails side. The person on the porch lives on the train tracks side. 

Tonight, Gene’s feet pound the sidewalk in the warm dusk, the whole town steeped in that orange light that comes just before sunset on warm days. It makes her feel like a tiny insect, stuck in amber, limbs moving slow as it sets around her. Maybe it’s the heat. Sytwell is sliding inexorably into a sticky summer that Gene is trying her very best to beat. The A/C at work is a dream. The unit at her grandpa’s house, less so. She’s been engaged in a bidding war on eBay over various standing fans for a week, desperate for something to help cool her down so she can sleep. 

Her sneakers hit the town square, and Gene stops to take a drink of water. Sweat is sliding sticky down the small of her back, her brother’s old varsity tee stuck to her. Irritably, she tugs at the front of it, trying to get some air circulating. Her left heel is smarting; protesting the new running shoes she’s trying in vain to break in. Across the square, a group of guys are laughing, and smoking. Eugene can smell the weed from where she’s standing. 

Self-consciousness shivers through her. Being back in Sytwell has made Gene regress in a number of ways, but this loneliness is probably the most unwelcome. It reminds her of being a kid again, made shy by her unpopularity, only a handful of fair-weather friends to keep her from complete anonymity. She doesn’t turn to look and see if the group of guys are familiar to her; the prospect of them recognising her before she recognises them is unpleasant. Instead, she takes off running again, imagining their eyes on her back.

The square opens up onto Albert Ave, home to the baseball diamond her brother used to play on, going brown in the sun. Gene runs past that, the low evening light catching in the chainlink fence as she passes by. An old shut-up hotdog cart, the candy striped awning faded from the sun and from age, a row of identical homes, then Gene crosses over to Acorn, to Gerard Street, and finally down onto Locust. Parallel to the train tracks, it’s hardly the most glamorous spot in town. Gene’s mom used to forbid her and her brother from playing in this part of Sytwell. Now, Gene breezes along it, dodging potholes as she runs right down the centre of the road. Really, there’s no difference between Locust and her own street. Sytwell isn’t big or bad enough to muster up any class differences. 

The person’s house has a red-painted front door, and an old Toyota Hilux from the 80s up on blocks in the drive. The wicker throne they’d been melted into when Gene had first seen them is empty, tonight. Gene slows as she comes to the house, taking in the worn, chipping white paint on the outside, the hazy world beyond the bug screens covering the sleeping porch, the open windows. She likes to invent stories about whoever the person in that house is. Did they paint that door, and purposely leave the rest of the house to fade in the sun? Maybe they plan to paint the whole house red one day, just to give the people of Sytwell something to gossip about. Maybe red is their favourite colour. Maybe it’s their least favourite. Maybe they hate the red door so much that they’re fixing up that old Hilux just to run away from it all. 

Gene runs on by. The world turns. The next time she passes the house, a handful of days later, the front door is green, and her interest deepens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading! i'll post the next chapter next monday :~)


	2. Chapter 2

Back when Gene was in middle school, when her whole world was that block between her house and her grandparents’ house, and sometimes the route to school, she’d gotten lost for a long afternoon in the trails. She doesn’t remember much of it at all, except for the strange quality of a place that was meant to be so familiar, becoming so suddenly alien. 

She still doesn’t know what had possessed her — ten years old and bordering on gawky, that streak of curiosity in her widening year by year. Maybe it was that. Maybe she wanted to expand her world as badly as the Gene of twenty six years wants to. Or maybe she’d just gotten spun around, mistook the street leading down into the forest as the street to her grandparents house. Either way, Gene can’t remember, and each eventuality leads to the same result. Gene, wandering deeper and deeper into the woods until her feet were sore, eventually being discovered by a couple walking their dog, who delivered her right back to her mom’s arms. 

“You didn’t cry once,” her mom would always say, when re-telling the story to whoever wanted to listen. “A ten year old, lost for hours, and she didn’t cry once!”

Gene was born with a heart murmur. She likes to think it toughened her up enough that something as little as getting lost was barely a blip on her emotional map.

Sytwell has a similar sort of quality for her now. But doesn’t coming back to the place you grew up always feel the same? Like she’s looking at an alternate version of the town from her childhood, maybe the same version where that path into the woods really did lead to her grandparents’ street.

Gene tries to go to the Rite Aid she once shoplifted from at fourteen. Closed, boarded over, graffiti dripping over the particle board keeping the teenagers from taking out the windows with rocks. She tries the old bookstore she used to spend hours in as a teenager; a narrow, tall building, stuffed to the rafters with second-hand books. Gone too. When Gene presses her face to the dusty windows, she can see all the books still inside. Yellowing, fading, waiting. 

She expects to find that Murrays, the local garage, has picked up sticks or deteriorated too, when she takes the truck down on Monday morning. But there it stands, wedged between a fast food place and an anonymous block of offices, a genuine fragment of Gene’s childhood in full faded technicolour. Seeing it, she feels young again, hanging out on the corner across from it with her brother. The paint on the sign is peeling now, and the concrete front is stained and pockmarked, but aside from that it hasn’t aged a day. Still those weathered old flags above the garage door, still the weeds and grass pushing up through the cracks in the concrete, the old Datsun up on cinderblocks, just as it had been when she was a kid. Everything has a patina to it in Sytwell, it’s just that Murrays wears it well. 

The truck had finally given out two days ago. Gene’s been walking to work since then; a mere mile walk, but the heat makes a mile feel like ten, and she’s tired of showing up to work sweating. Her grandpa thinks it’s the battery. Gene thinks it’s the transmission. She expects that Murray, the hardheaded owner of the garage, will find some third thing wrong with it that will send her and her bank account reeling. Apparently he’s been begging Gene’s grandpa to scrap the truck for years, long before grandpa’s eyes got bad and he stopped driving. But Gene feels ready to go up against the brick wall that’s Murray today, for whatever reason. She’s in a bad mood. Her mom had called her and told her all about how Edward has fourteen confirmed kills on cardboard targets or something, just a couple hours ago.

“Impressive,” she had deadpanned, and her mom had agreed with no hint of irony in her voice. 

Gene had got the morning off work for this, as time doesn’t work the same in Sytwell as it does everywhere else, and Murrays is only open from eight a.m until two p.m. She secretly suspects her boss is just as tired of her coming in sweaty and dishevelled as she is herself, as the guy had agreed a little too enthusiastically to her morning off request.

Murray is out front smoking a cigarette when Gene pulls up, and it takes him a long, searching look at her face before Gene sees a flash of recognition there.

“Genie Sledge!” he cries, voice rasping. The old shop dog, Sarge, doesn’t even lift his head as Murray steps over him to shake Gene’s hand. “Your grandaddy still runnin’ this thing?” He gestures to the truck, idling behind Gene, who had just stepped down from it. Gene’s afraid to take the keys out and have the engine settle: she’d had to knock her neighbours’ door and ask for jumper cables at seven-thirty that morning, so considers the battery life hard-won. 

“Tryin’ to,” she mutters, and grins at Murray’s laugh. “Actually, it’s mine now. I’m home for a while.”

“Well, good,” he says, eyes squinted against the sun as he looks up at her. “I remember you and your brother runnin’ ‘round here every summer.”

Gene nods, and rocks back on her heels. “He’s in the Army now,” she offers, and Murray whistles. It always what people like to hear.

Across from Murrays, back when Gene and Edward were younger, was this corner store that sold candy in little paper bags. Just perfect for a good child’s-palmful. The tops jagged like teeth, pulled off from a roll of other bags, like toilet paper. Thin and quick to get greasy if there were gummies inside. Grandpa used to give them a quarter each, and post up talking to Murray while Gene and Edward hung around and ran off their subsequent sugar high. The two men are the same age, but Gramma’s death seemed to have aged Grandpa by decades. Gene glances at the lawn chair that Murray had risen from. The two of them used to sit side by side, that old dog at their feet, and tell old man jokes all afternoon. It makes Gene’s heart squeeze with a melancholy sort of nostalgia. She hadn’t realised how much of her life is wrapped up in Sytwell, not until she came back and started remembering everything. 

The dog is up now, and sniffing at Gene’s shoelaces. Murray casts a critical eye over the truck, hand on his brow to keep the sun from his face. He clicks his tongue. “Y’know,” he says, “I swore to your grandaddy I’d never look at this thing again.”

“I won’t tell him if you don’t,” she jokes, but Murray’s mouth is a flat line.

“Could scrap it for a buck fifty, probably,” he says, drifting closer to the truck. As though checking a horse’s teeth, he taps his palm against the hood, then knocks his knuckles against it. “Buck, maybe.”

Dryly, Gene mutters, “I don’t think I’ll be able to get anything new for a hundred dollars.”

He shrugs. “Genie, I’ve been telling your grandaddy to get rid of this thing for years. It’ll run you more in repairs than buyin’ somethin’ secondhand.”

“He’s attached to it,” she says, and leaves it at that. Murray sighs, and then steps away from it. The dog nudges his wet, cold nose into Gene’s palm; absently, she pats at his warm head. “Please,” she adds, and the man crosses his arms over his chest. “You know what he’s like about it.”

“Thought you said it was yours,” Murray mutters, but gestures for Gene to follow him into the office. It’s cool and dark after standing in the beating-down heat of the lot, and Gene blinks a couple times to let her eyes adjust to the light. A fan rattles away in the corner, shouldered between an ancient coffee machine and an even older microwave. A nudie calendar from 1987 breaks up the cracked concrete walls, Miss October smiling coyly down at Gene, who shuffles her feet.

“Take a seat,” Murray says, brusquely, gesturing to the moulded plastic seats lining the wall. Gene sits. Murray disappears. 

There’s a TV mounted on the wall opposite the seats, the audio fuzzy and the picture hard to make out. Gene watches it for lack of anything better to do, picking at her nails and trying to prepare herself for the worst, bill-wise. If she expects it to be around a thousand, then five-hundred dollars is nothing, right? She keeps catching Miss October’s eye. How old would that model be now? As old as Murray?

“Y’know,” a voice comes from the doorway, “that TV ain’t even playin’ actual TV. Murray puts a tape of some gameshow from the eighties on ‘cause he’s too cheap to pay for cable.”

“What?” Gene says, and whatever comment she was about to make dies on her lips as she looks to who’s speaking to her, and sees the girl silhouetted against the bright daylight outside.

She’s unmistakably, undoubtedly, the person from the stoop. That same dark hair, though it’s pulled back from her sharp little face in a rough knot at the top of her head now. That same looseness to her body language, slumped up against the doorframe with her arms crossed over her chest. Loose black dickies, a singlet that might have once been white. 

Gene remembers her. Merriell Shelton, of the grade above her. One of the boys; always getting in trouble, always dressed in her many brothers’ hand-me-downs with wild wild hair. Gene’s mom used to tut about her. “Can’t do a little girl good, surrounded by all those men,” she used to say, eyes on the pack of Sheltons lingering outside the school gates to pick her up. The lot of them dark-haired and green-eyed, always smiling with their teeth but not their eyes. And now, here she is, like an oversized version of her young self. Still in those hand-me-downs, it looks like. Still that wild black hair. Gene can’t pry her tongue from the roof of her mouth.

“Yeah,” Merriell continues, seemingly oblivious to Gene’s distraction. “I go home at night and don’t even have to watch my own TV, ‘cause I can recite that word for word.” She scratches at her chest, and then finally looks to Gene. “Hey — do I know you?”

In a small voice, Gene mutters, “I think we went to middle school together.”

The girl looks at her, pale eyes heavy-lidded and considering as they flick over Gene’s face. “Huh,” she says, and her eyes linger. Gene can’t look away. The pleasingly full pout of her mouth twitches — like she’s about to smile, but never makes it there. “I don’t remember you,” she says, finally, and Gene blushes, and looks away. 

Silence rings in the small room, only broken by the shuddering old fan in the corner, the ancient fuzzy gameshow.

“Well,” Merriell begins, once it becomes clear that Gene had swallowed her tongue about five minutes ago. “Murray don’t wanna work on your truck, so he’s got me on the job.”

Gene unsticks her tongue from her stomach lining, and mumbles an embarrassed, “It’s my grandpa’s, really.”

Merriell eyes her. “Okay,” she says. “But you brought it in?”

Gene glances away just to be free of Merriell’s heavy-lidded gaze, locks eyes with Miss October, and then looks away just as quickly. “Yeah,” she stumbles over, “yeah, I — I drive it, right now, I’m home for a little while so —”

Merriell cuts Gene off by unsticking herself from the doorjamb, and stepping back out into the sunlit lot. After a beat, Gene follows her, eyes squinted against the sudden brightness of outside. Ridiculously, her palms feel sweaty. All those nights of running past that house, and she stumbles across the owner now without any warning? And the fact that she’s Merriell Shelton, of the scraped knees and the lifetime pass to detention? Gene feels distinctly like she’s about to wake up sweating in her own bed, her alarm clock ringing in her ear. 

She’s more intriguing up close. The heaviness of her eyes lends something sleepy and sultry to her face; not exactly pretty, but something that makes it hard to look away. As a teenager, she’d been a scowling, skinny thing, all elbows and big black brows. Gene hadn’t even considered that she’d still be in Sytwell, not with the way her brothers had all moved away, one by one. 

“Did Murray already tell you to scrap it?” she asks, seemingly oblivious to Gene’s eyes boring holes into the back of her head. She yanks on the driver’s side door handle, long muscles moving under the sun-browned skin of her arm, and then huffs when it doesn’t open. Gene passes the keys into her waiting, outstretched hand. Freckles on her shoulders. Fuck.

“It has a lot of sentimental value,” Gene murmurs, watching as Merriell hauls herself into the driver’s seat and tries to start the car. Gene winces at the noise it makes, the engine gasping as it tries to turn over. “I’d really appreciate it if you could get it running,” she adds, raising her voice over the engine noise. “I don’t go far in it, so —”

The engine cuts out. Gene quiets, voice suddenly too loud for the silent stillness of an early morning in Sytwell. Merriell, half-leaning out the open window, is squinting at her.

“I do remember you,” she says. Then her face lights up, mouth curling in a wicked grin as she snaps her fingers, and then points. “You had that big ponytail all the boys used to yank on. Sledge, right? Your brother did ROTC.”

Gene stares at her. “What?” 

Merriell has already moved on. She hops down out of the truck, leaning back into it to pop the hood, all the while saying, “This truck ain’t comin’ back to life. I can promise that. Shit, I think this thing is older than both of us combined —”

Gene does the math quickly in her head. Merriell’s not far off.

“— And everything has a limit, huh? We all gotta die one day, even trucks…” she trails off, hidden behind the propped-up hood of the truck. Gene stares at the empty lot where the corner shop she and her brother used to buy candy from had once sat. Is this real? Is this happening? The sun is beating down hot on the nape of her neck, through her thin shirt. It’s real. It’s happening. She’s found the girl from the porch and an old schoolyard infatuation all in one. Gene wants to wonder at the chances of it, but really, she should’ve known. Sytwell is populated by strange, vague faces from her childhood, after all.

“It really needs to be fixed,” she hears herself fret, wandering closer to the front of the truck. Under the hood, Merriell’s sure, broad hands dance over all the black inside. Eugene doesn’t know a thing about cars. She’s too busy feeling the shock of Merriell remembering her to even pretend. 

“And I really need a smoke,” Merriell deadpans. Her eyes flick up, pale under sooty lashes. “We can’t get everythin’ we need, huh?”

Gene wonders if Merriell remembers that it was her who had once pulled on Gene’s ponytail. Probably not. Gene only does because when she’d complained about it to her mom, she’d replied, “Well, it normally means that boys like you.” Merriell got mistaken for a boy a lot, between that hoard of brothers and her own tomboyishness. Still could, at a glance. 

“You wanna go sit inside with the fan?” Merriell asks, yanking Gene out of her reverie. She lifts her arm to wipe at the sweat on her forehead, and Gene’s eyes glue to the dark hair under it. She can feel how red her face is, all the way to her ears. 

“No,” she says, eloquently, and retreats to the cab of the truck as Merriell watches curiously. 

In the glovebox, secreted away behind the manual and a pair of sunglasses warped from the heat, is a pack of smokes. She grabs for it, then shows it to Merriell through the window. The girl’s eyebrows raise. “Smoke?” Gene asks, and watches Merriell’s expression change. 

They sit in the lawn chairs that Murray and Gene’s grandpa used to shoot the shit in, and Gene forces herself to relax. Sarge comes out to join them, flopping down at Merriell’s feet with a huff, like it was an inconvenience to him to come out. She leans forward to sink her fingers into the thick ruff of fur around his neck, and he sighs.

“I really don’t wanna scrap the truck,” Gene says, watching Merriell scratch at the dog’s head. An absent smile is curving her mouth, and it stays there as she flicks her eyes up to meet Gene’s.

“I don’t know if you think I’m some sorta miracle worker,” she mutters, but doesn’t finish her thought. Just leans back in the chair and props her ankle on her knee, looks to Gene expectantly. “You said somethin’ ‘bout a smoke?”

Gene looks at her a second, and then drops her attention to the cigarettes in her lap, fumbling two free and handing one to Merriell, who takes it with a grin. She produces her own lighter, and they share a moment of silence as they light up. The town is beginning to shimmer in the sun, that morning light hitting the windows of the surrounding buildings and turning them into glossy mirrors. In an hour, sitting here with no shade will be intolerable. Gene’s truck was hot to the touch from sitting out in the sun for only a handful of minutes.

By her side, Merriell ashes over the arm over her chair, the movement pulling Gene to her again. She’s slumped back, eyes closed, like she’s sunbathing; not on the clock. As if sensing Gene’s eyes on her, she speaks. “It ain’t as bad as Murray makes it out to be.” She takes a draw on her cigarette, and then grimaces, blinks an eye open to catch Gene staring. “Menthol?” 

Gene glances away, down to her own cigarette burning itself away between her fingers. “They’re old,” she murmurs, and when she looks back Merriell has her eyes shut again, cigarette in her mouth despite the menthol. 

“Not a lot of people come back to Sytwell,” she says, like Gene’s truck isn’t sitting there half-dead in the sun behind them. Gene looks around, wonders if Murray is watching them. He doesn’t seem like a guy who’d tolerate a mid-work smoke break like this. Merriell is practically melted into the lawn chair now, the boot that she has propped on her knee tapping along to some inaudible song. 

Her eye flicks open again. Belatedly, Gene realises she wants a response.

“I ain’t back for good,” she says, quickly. “Well, back for a while, I guess. Lookin’ after my grandpa.”

Merriell hums. Both eyes are open now, smoke streaming from her nose as she plucks the cigarette from her mouth to say, “Very noble of you.”

Gene blinks at her. “Well, I ain’t doin’ it to be noble,” she snaps, forgetting herself. Again, that expression passes over Merriell’s face, that smile-that’s-not-a-smile. Dimly, Gene realises this is the most words they’ve ever spoken to each other. Maybe it’s for a reason. 

They lapse into silence. It’s awkward, though Gene is certain it’s only awkward on her end. She takes a drag from her cigarette, wonders just how burned the back of her neck is gonna be when she gets home later. The sun is like a hot hand on her head, making her feel drowsy, sweaty.

“I think he’s just tryin’ to keep this thing with your grandpa goin’,” Merriell says, suddenly. Gene looks to her in askance, and Merriell’s eyes skip away across the road. “Murray. The truck ain’t as bad as he makes it out to be, he’s just fuckin’ with your grandpa.”

“Oh,” Gene says.

Merriell rolls her head to look at her. “Yeah.” 

There’s a hand-shaped smear of black on the front of her singlet, right between her breasts; Gene’s eyes keep skipping between it and her face and the empty lot across the road. She needs to get into the icy A/C of the library. She needs to stop talking to Merriell Shelton. 

“Can you fix it?” she asks, grinding her cigarette out under the toe of her sneaker as she stands. Merriell blinks up at her, hand shading her eyes as Gene stands over her. If she’s surprised by the sudden change in Gene’s tone, she doesn’t show it. 

“Leave it to me,” she drawls, the corner of her mouth curling. “You left your number with Murray?”

Gene stuffs her cigarettes into the back pocket of her jeans, and shrugs. She’s doing her very best to look anywhere but at Merriell’s catlike smirk. “He’s got my grandpa on file, I think.”

“I’ll call you, then,” she says, and lets her head rest against the back of the lawn chair. Gene stares at her for a moment longer; the dark curl of her hair, the hint of a tattoo at the curve of her bicep. Gene wants to ask her something, but doesn’t quite know what she wants to say. _Why are you still here?_ feels oddly accusatory, but _why do you remember me?_ just sounds strange. 

In the end, she says nothing. Leaves her truck in Merriell’s dubiously safe hands, and makes a beeline for the A/C at work.

That night, Gene takes the same route she always does. Headphones silent in her ears. The world warm and lit golden by that fleeting light of the setting sun. Soon, it’ll be cooler, and bluer, and Gene won’t have to squint her eyes against the low light of it. Her breath comes quick, and easy; she’s in better shape these days. Nights when she was at university mostly consisted of coffee, secret cigarettes, something quick and easy to cook in the microwave of her pokey studio apartment. Hunched over her desk with whatever assignment she was determined to get a good grade on, ignoring how it made her back ache. Not that she regrets even a second of any of it but, well. Maybe she should’ve made more time for her body. 

She’s settled into a vaguely trance-like state by the time her sneakers hit the potholes of downtown, her reflection distorted and chasing her in the shop windows that she passes. Thoughts of Merriell far to the back of her mind. A lot of downtown is either closed up or boarded over, giving the place an eerie, ghost-town-like silence as she passes through. Just to amuse herself, Gene imagines she’s the last survivor on earth; from a hurricane, a zombie apocalypse, anything. Just her and nobody to nag her. She could sit and listen to the birds to her heart’s content. 

Her feet hit Locust Street, and then something snags in her brain, a barbed fish hook deflating her little fantasies of the world taking back the land. Images of all the ugly mid-sixties era buildings downtown becoming choked by ivy and moss vanish; replaced by a figure backlit by a porch light, skinny knees knocked up to a chest, bare feet curling against the arm of a faded wicker chair. Gene’s feet veer without her brain telling them to; avoiding Merriell’s laughter, that confident slouch, skipping two blocks down until she’s racing the woods instead of her own reflection.

Gene’s schoolyard infatuation with Merriell was one of those things that you realise as an adult, retrospectively. One of those funny childhood things you look back on and laugh at, or use as a story at a party to tell people how you were gay before you even knew it. Never ever did Gene think she’d be re-igniting it so vividly.

She’s not sure whether it’s really the unearthing of some old crush, or whether it’s just her loneliness attaching her to the nearest person close to her age. Both are plausible. As a kid, she’d been fascinated by Merriell in the same way she was fascinated by her gramma’s old birdwatching books. Something curious to look at, to wonder over. All those delicate little watercolours between the fragile pages of those books. The flash of Merriell’s pale eyes against the unkempt dark curl of her hair. The careful mapping of a bird’s markings, their bright little eyes coming off the page. The scrapes on Merriell’s palms, the picked-to-the-quick fingernails and the way all her clothes fit her a size too big. It felt the same to Eugene, as a child. It feels pretty similar now. 

Merriell had spoken to Gene only once, when they were in school together. Before they both shot through to high school, before Merriell dropped out and Gene moved away. In the yard during recess, Merriell had sat herself down on the same bench that Gene was sitting on. Breathing hard and smelling like clean sweat and dirty hair. Gene remembers how her heart had beat in her chest, how she’d kept her eyes on the pad of paper on her knees and not looked up. Gene was quiet in school. She used to sit at one of the round metal picnic tables on the grass, and read, or do homework, or draw. She recalls the scream of kids, the tussle of the game of soccer that Merriell had just detached herself from to sit for a second. Her knee was bleeding. Isn’t it funny, the things that stay in your memory? Gene doesn’t remember her gramma’s funeral, but she remembers this. Merriell, sliding along the metal bench to close the space between them. It had been a warm day; the bench was hot under Gene’s thighs, through her pants. 

“What’cha drawin’?” she’d asked, ducking her head close. That warm smell of hair. 

Gene’s voice had been small when she replied. “A cardinal.”

The red marker she was using for the plumage had bled through onto her math notes underneath. She’d been mad about it later, when she discovered it. Had copied it all back out onto a fresh new page. In that moment, though, she didn’t think about it. Couldn’t think about it, not with Merriell’s finger tapping at the page in front of her. The black half-moon of dirt under the nail, the picked-raw skin at the cuticle. Merriell had replied, “This looks real, like art.”

Then she had gone back to the soccer game. And Gene had torn the drawing of the bird out, and slipped it through the vents in her locker a day later. It was never spoken of again.

She wonders if Merriell had kept the bird. She doesn’t even know the girl well enough to guess at what she might have done with it. 

“Good run?” her grandpa asks when she returns, sweaty and red-faced, her brain the sinkhole that all her thoughts are swirling around. She blinks at him. They’re caught in the shadowy hallway, the chatter of the TV rising above the sounds of the nighttime street. 

“Good,” she murmurs, and goes to close the front door behind her. 

Her grandpa, crossed through to the kitchen, calls, “Just shut the screen! It’s hot.”

She shuts the screen door, and follows him through into the kitchen, taking the glass of water he’s readied her with a rueful smile. “Thanks,” she says, and gulps at it. They eye each other through the near-darkness; the twilight gloom leeching all colour from the world. Her grandpa is all made up in blacks and greys, pottering from cupboard to fridge to counter.

“You hungry?” he asks, all the fixings for a sandwich in his arms. Gene shrugs one shoulder, and he laughs. “Alright, I’ll eat what you don’t.”

The house is hot, still clinging hard to the heat of the day and full up with the low-lying stuffiness of night. Gene yearns for the fresh coolness of spring nights. Summer lies like a thick, humid blanket over Sytwell every year, and Gene feels like she’s wilting in it. She finishes the water, and takes a trip to the freezer to drop a couple ice cubes in the next one. 

“How’s the car?” her grandpa asks, once Gene has heaved herself up onto the kitchen counter next to him, sipping at her water and knocking her heels against the cabinet door. 

“Hmm.” She rocks her hand from side to side, mouth full with an ice cube. The morning had felt like a lifetime ago; Gene’s still reeling from the shock of finding Merriell in such a tucked-away part of Sytwell, lounging there in the garage doorway like she’d been waiting on Gene. Like she knew Gene was right in the middle of a significant slump. “There’s hope,” she says, in answer to her grandpa’s question. And then, “D’you know a girl I was in middle school with works down there?”

The clatter of a knife on the inside of the jar of mayo. Her grandpa nods. “The Shelton girl.” He glances at her. “Were you kids friends?”

Gene shrugs. The cardinal, the hot metal bench on the backs of her thighs. “Not really.” She wonders if Merriell’s hair still smells the same.

“She’s cute,” her grandpa says, and Gene groans, covering her face with her hand. “She’s a lesbian, Genie.”

“Grandpa!” 

“Murray told me,” he says, sagely, and hands Gene the sandwich he made. She takes a bite, trying to push down the sheer embarrassment flooding over her. Her toes are curling in her sneakers with it. 

“Don’t try and set me up,” she warns him. “I mean it.”

“Tellin’ you a fact ain’t settin’ you up,” he says, and laughs at Gene’s scowl. “Alright, alright, I ain’t sayin’ nothin’.”

“You better not,” she threatens, and tears half of the sandwich away to give to him. 

They eat in silence, in the steadily darkening kitchen. The TV plays to no-one in the living room, lighting the hallway with sporadic colours. Blue, grey, a flash of red. Gene is turning over her grandpa’s words in her head, chewing thoughtfully at the chicken sandwich in her hand. It’s not really news; he hadn’t needed to tell her. No girl wears no bra and a pair of dickies like that if they aren’t gay. Gene can feel her face warming up as she recalls the way Merriell’s eyes had settled on her; heavy-lidded and considering. 

She finishes her sandwich, and hops down from the counter. “I’m takin’ a shower,” she says, setting her glass down in the sink. “Merriell said she’d call about the truck; I think it’s your number Murray has on file so —” 

They both glance to the ancient landline, unplugged with the cable wrapped around it. Grandpa has been bugging Gene to take it to the recycling centre for weeks. It had broken about two years ago. 

“Oh, shit,” she mutters, and slaps a hand over her eyes. Her grandpa laughs. 

The knife and cutting board find their way into the sink, and the light from the fridge cuts the nighttime gloom as her grandpa puts the mayo and chicken away. “You’ll have to go by on your way to work,” he says, and then looks back over his shoulder with a grin. “Or d’you want me to?”

“You can stay right here,” Gene says, quickly. “It’s on my way to work anyway.”

“Okay,” he says, easily, but he’s still smiling when Gene flees to take a shower, the expression lighting up his tired old face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a longer chapter to make up for my lateness! i was away on a much-needed trip with friends lol. hope you enjoyed, and thanks for reading! i'll update wednesdays from now on :~)


	3. Chapter 3

Gene drops by the garage the next morning, nervous; nervous about being nervous. The day is overcast, but muggy, and Merriell’s hair is a mass of curls in the humidity, barely restrained by the out-of-character little scrunchie holding it all away from her face.

“Hey,” Gene calls, when Merriell sees her but fails to greet her. “I need to give you my number!”

Across the lot, Gene hears a laugh that can only be Murray’s. Merriell, who is smoking a cigarette leaned up against the wall beside the office, grins. 

“Say that again,” she drawls, and Gene groans, and swipes a hand over her face. Her sneakers toe the wiggly black line of asphalt that delineates sidewalk from lot. For some reason, she’s having a hard time crossing it. 

“You know what I mean,” she says, and Merriell unhitches herself from the wall to wander closer. 

Her eyes are heavy-lidded, amused, a flash of all that gold jewellery in her ear as she turns her head to yell, “Stop listenin’,” in the general direction of where Murray must be. Gene swallows. Merriell’s smirk stretches. “Didn’t think you’d be back so soon,” she says. Gene glances over her shoulder at the office.

“I just came to update my number, or else you can’t get hold of me.”

Merriell blinks slowly. “Really?” 

“Yes,” Gene says, firmly, and Merriell laughs.

“Huh,” she mutters, and then takes a step away. Gene can still smell her cigarette smoke, even as she takes another step backwards. “Alright, follow me.”

They crowd together into the concrete-walled office, the fan cranking away to nobody but Sarge, who is lying under the seats with his chin on the floor. Gene glances at the TV, only to find the same gameshow that had been on yesterday playing to the room. She almost laughs, but covers it up, glances back to Merriell to find the girl looking at her. There’s that expression on her face again, that smile-but-not-quite.

“You think I’d lie about the tape?” she asks, as she turns away to begin rifling through one of the tall industrial filing cabinets behind the desk. 

“I dunno,” Gene mutters, leaning her shoulder against the doorjamb as she watches Merriell slam the drawer shut, and start on the one below it. “What’s with the nudie calendar?” she adds, and Merriell snorts.

“Gotta have somethin’ me and Murray can talk about that ain’t how much he hates the French.” She slams that drawer shut too, and starts in the one below that.

Helpfully, Gene says, “It’s Sledge.”

“They’re not alphabetised,” Merriell mutters, because of course not. Gene casts her eyes to the ceiling in a valiant attempt to keep from looking down the front of Merriell’s singlet. It’s the same one from yesterday, for sure. The black mark down the front now has a companion, but it’s the same. “So you keep up with anyone from high school?” she asks.

Gene, so taken aback at being asked a question out of the blue, just blinks at the side of the girl’s head. “No,” she says, a little too brusquely. Merriell hums, and plucks a folder from the recesses of the drawer.

“Probably for the best,” she says, not glancing up as she spreads the file over the desk. Guiltily, Gene looks down her top. “Your number?” she asks, and looks up just in time to catch Gene’s eyes on her tits. 

Face red, Gene hikes them back up to Merriell’s face, but it’s too little too late. The girl is grinning, this toothy, ear-to-ear grin that makes Gene want to curl up and hide. Wolfish, amused. The room seems to shrink smaller, as airless and boxy and cramped as it is.

“Your number,” Merriell says again, slower. Gene recites it to her with numb lips, staring at the wall behind her when Merriell bends to write it down. “Cool,” she says, and opens a drawer at random to shove the folder back inside. “You know, I see you runnin’ a lot.”

“Oh,” Eugene says. 

“Yeah, you run right down the middle of the road on Locust. I didn’t recognise you at first but,” she shrugs, and slams the drawer shut. Turns to pin Gene under that sharp, pale gaze. “There’s only a handful of people who ain’t either geriatric or children ‘round here.”

Gene says, “I suppose you’re right.”

Merriell’s mouth curls. “You suppose,” she parrots, and settles her palms to the top of the desk, leans forward. Somehow, the room shrinks smaller. “Your truck ain’t lookin’ so good.” 

Internally, Gene thinks, _does she think this is flirting?_ Out loud, she manages, “Oh.”

“Might need to keep it for longer,” she drawls, big eyes darting to the open doorway and then back to Gene’s face. “I guess you’re stuck walkin’ to work, huh?”

It clicks into place. She _does_ think this is flirting. In an instant, Gene’s nerves are gone. She almost wants to laugh. How cute. How surreal. Fourteen year old Gene would have passed out on the spot. “It’s only a mile,” she says, and crosses her arms over her chest. Watches Merriell track the movement. “Ain’t too bad.”

It’s Merriell’s turn to blink. “Oh,” she says, and Gene has to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. 

“Kinda sucks on hot days though,” she says, and straightens up. A glance at her watch tells her she’s running late; Gene has to fight to keep the sudden tightness off her face as she realises it. Her boss won’t be mad; he knows she’s having car trouble, but still. Gene is generally preternaturally on time. It always hurts to break a streak. “I gotta get goin’.”

Merriell, to her credit, recovers quickly. “Lemme give you a ride,” she says, and straightens up too. Her hands go to her hair; pulling her hair tie out from where her curls have steadily been escaping, and drawing it all back up into a brand new knot. Gene watches her singlet lift, flirting with the high waistband of her pants. Her stomach twists. How can she say no?

If the drive from Gene’s house to work isn’t long enough to listen to _Fast Car_ , the route from the middle of town to the library is barely enough time for a conversation. 

Gene has time to ask “Have you been in Sytwell this whole time?” Merriell has time to drive erratically. And then they’re there, idling on the curb outside the library, Gene wondering anxiously if her co-workers will smell Merriell’s cigarette on her clothes, in her hair. Merriell won’t stop looking at her.

“If I left Sytwell it could like, collapse,” Merriell says, seriously. She takes a draw from her cigarette. Gene’s hands twitch in her lap. “It’d get sucked into a black hole and cease to exist.”

“Uh huh,” Gene says, and then, “Can I have a drag?”

The cigarette changes hands. Gene is late for work, but can’t quite bring herself to care. Merriell drives this beat-up old Honda from the nineties, which is not what Gene had been expecting at all so she’s struggling to adjust. The glovebox is busted and hanging open; a pair of boots dirty the backseat. The car smells like cigarettes and the pine air freshener hung over the rearview. It’s at once the exact car she’d expected of the Merriell she knew in middle school, and the exact opposite of what she’d expected of grown Merriell. 

“I’m late for work,” Gene says, as she hands the cigarette back. Neither of them make a move to change that. In the close space, Gene can smell Merriell’s hair. It’s decidedly over-intimate, but she can’t find it in herself to care. 

“I’ll drive you to work tomorrow,” Merriell says. It’s not a question. Gene, despite herself, feels her face go pink. Knowing that Merriell is trying to get close to her doesn’t do anything to lessen the blow of it, apparently. Gene can’t remember the last time that someone pursued her with so little finesse.

“I like the exercise,” she says, because her parents have always told her she’s contrary. Merriell grins at it, that same toothy smile from the office.

“Ain’t that what your runnin’ is for?” she asks. “Or are you gonna stop comin’ down my street now?”

Gene takes the cigarette when Merriell passes it to her. “I didn’t know it was your street,” she says, honestly. Merriell doesn’t have to know that she was the mystery girl of Gene’s misplaced affections. Does Merriell know that it was Gene that she’d spoken to, all those weeks ago? 

“Now you know,” Merriell says, and Gene takes a drag from their now-shared cigarette. She’s definitely going to smell like smoke when she walks into work. Fuck. She hands it back. Merriell is watching her closely, something eagle-eyed and attentive in her pale gaze. It occurs to Gene, belatedly, that Merriell’s waiting on her to respond to her offer.

Summoning every last bit of inner strength that she has, Gene says, “I’ll be fine walkin’, thanks.” She doesn’t know what possesses her to say it. Only, she knows that sometimes the chase is the sweetest part of the whole game. She can feel Merriell’s eyes on her throat, on her hands, on her mouth as she takes one final drag before passing the cigarette back. Her stomach flutters. She puts a hand on her bag, sat between her ankles. “Keep me updated about the truck,” she says. And then, bravely, “You’ve got my number now.”

Work passes in a daze. Gene keeps replaying their conversation in the car over and over, butterflies in her stomach as she recalls the way Merriell had flirted with her. It feels good to have the upper hand. The expression of surprise that had flitted over Merriell’s face when Gene had turned down her offer was satisfying — so brief that if Gene had blinked, she would’ve missed it. But she didn’t. She saw Merriell hesitate, just before she smiled. 

Is it real attraction, or just boredom, loneliness? Or even teenage wish fulfilment? Does it matter? Gene can’t stop thinking about her, that same preoccupation she’d had with her before Gene had even know the figure from the porch was Merriell. The bony crook of her wrist, the way her singlet had dipped away from her chest. Gene’s been asking for a distraction for months. Has the universe finally delivered her one?

Gene dodges potholes down the centre of Locust that evening, sweat on her brow, clinging to the cropped close hair at the nape of her neck. Sneakers pounding the asphalt, eyes on the shimmering horizon and not on the houses that watch her pass.

She can feel eyes on her. It takes a great deal of effort not to look to the side, and meet them.

—————

The truck stays locked up in Murray’s lot for the rest of the week. Fleetingly, Gene wonders if Merriell is even working on it; whether she’s drawing it out until Gene gets sick and tired of sweating her way across town to work, and takes Merriell up on her offer. Gene doesn’t know Merriell well enough to answer her own question, but wouldn’t put it past her. Whether Gene is amplifying her own importance to Merriell is another thing entirely. 

It had felt nice to be looked at, the two of them tucked away together in the front of Merriell’s car. Looked at in a way she hasn’t been in a while. Like she’s desirable, like she’s a person. Gene’s interest in hookups and dating waned as her university career progressed; she hasn’t even really thought about sex in a long time, let alone had it. Whenever she thinks of Merriell’s eyes on her throat, on her collarbones, Gene feels herself go so warm she knows she must be blushing. 

As it is, work keeps her busy enough to keep Merriell from the forefront of Gene’s mind. Summertime means kids’ programs, which means Gene sitting on the floor of the living room with a mountain of craft materials and glitter on a Friday night. Her grandpa, watching another World War II documentary, seems to enjoy it. 

“Reminds me of when you were little,” he says, as Gene snips a wonky star from a piece of construction paper. 

“Have I gotten better?” she asks, holding the star up, smiling as her grandpa glances at it and laughs.

“Maybe you peaked early, Genie,” he mutters, turning back to the television. 

Gene laughs, shocked. “You’re supposed to encourage me,” she accuses, letting the star drop into the pile of similarly-lopsided ones she’s already cut out. The construction paper makes a flopping noise as she shakes it and starts it on another. 

Grandpa’s reply is a beat too late. “Did plenty of that when you were a kid,” he murmurs, and then sighs. Gene glances up. His voice is thick with tiredness; his face heavy with it. Eyes glazed over behind his glasses, trained on the television but not really watching it. Gene’s eyes skip over the lines in his face, his shuddery hands as he moves to push his glasses further up his face. She’s seen pictures of her grandpa when he was young, all handsome and straight-backed in his army uniform, her gramma on his arm. It’s hard to match the boy up with the old man. She wonders what her kids will think when they look at pictures of Gene from this time. Will they see the loneliness? The unsureness? The tightness around her eyes?

“Maybe you should go to bed,” she says, gently. Her watch tells her the night is barely nudging towards midnight, but it’s late for an old man — especially an old man who rarely sleeps as it is. She worries after him, sleeping in his recliner as he’s been doing lately. 

His eyes slide to meet her own, glassy and tired. “Maybe in a little while, Genie.” In front of him, the TV flicks to ads, and he groans as he reaches for the remote to turn the sound down. “Are you tired?” he asks, the A/C unit set in the window running loudly into the newly quiet room. Gene drops her eyes back to the construction paper in her hands, the scissors working audibly through the paper as she considers the question.

“Not too bad,” she says. Briefly, Gene considers abandoning the topic. If she’s learned anything over the past few months, it’s that she can’t make her grandpa do anything that he doesn’t want to. And there’s a lot he doesn’t want to do. The refusal to sleep in his own bed is frustrating, and an impossible battle to win. In the beginning, Gene had tried to get him to switch rooms; to sleep in the guest bed while she takes the one he had shared with her gramma. That had been somehow worse than leaving the room to stand empty and him to sleep on the sofa. 

“You want a drink?” he asks, and Gene hums. She listens to him get up, cross to the kitchen. Cabinets opening, the clink of ice into a couple glasses.

“Thanks,” she says, when he returns and hands her the scotch. The ice shifts against the sides of the glass as she takes a sip, and sets it down next to her. The stars are finished. Gene shifts to pink paper, to hearts, and says, “Maybe we could get a futon.”

Her grandpa says, “Ha.” 

“Well it’ll be better for your back than sleepin’ in that chair,” she says. The documentary must come back on then; the volume of the TV comes back up to normal. “Not as good as the whole king-size with the tempurpedic mattress in the other room but —”

“Give it a rest, Genie,” he says, and they both fall quiet. Gene’s in no mood to nag, really. The room is cool, and dark, the repetitive motions of cutting shapes from paper lulling Gene into a peaceful brainlessness. She’s thinking about Merriell again. Thinking dreamily about the hair on her stomach. The tiny little Venus symbol tattooed on the jut of her wrist. The love hearts Gene’s cutting out flutter down into her lap; she’s working faster through them than the stars.

“What’s the plan with all those anyway?” her grandpa asks, and when Gene glances up he’s watching her. Fondness in his expression. She snorts, and sets the scissors down to pick the hearts from her lap, letting them join the stars.

“We’re doin’ a readin’ challenge for the kids this month,” she mutters, and settles back against the bottom of the sofa, stretching her legs out with a groan. The floor is hard under her, but she can’t really find it within herself to move. She takes another sip of her scotch. “I always get saddled with makin’ the signs.”

“You’re artistic,” her grandpa says, and Gene laughs.

“Hardly what I’m good at,” she says, and another heart flutters to her lap. “None of this is what I’m really good at,” she adds, after a moment. 

“You’re young,” he says, quietly. The ice in his glass clatters against the side as he takes a drink. “Don’t worry your head that you ain’t doin’ your dream job just yet.”

Gene looks at him, and sees that young man in the photographs again. She wonders if that version of her grandpa ever felt lost like she does. “What did you wanna do when you were my age?” she asks, and he snorts.

“Your uncle was two years old when I was your age, Genie.” His fingers tap against the arm of the sofa. Gene watches him by the pale wash of the TV screen. “I was fresh outta the Army. All I wanted to do was be with your gramma, and be at home.”

Gene pillows her cheek on her knuckles, eyes sliding to the war documentary on the TV. “That’s romantic,” she murmurs. Gene’s never loved like that. She wonders if she ever will. Enough of a love to keep her from sleeping in the bed she shared with whoever she falls for, to keep her clinging to a house that had been theirs. 

She leaves him to the living room, in the end. Smokes a cigarette perched on her windowsill, sleepy from the heat and from a long day at work, googling affordable futons and resolutely not reading her mom’s midnight text. The first line of it that she’d glimpsed from her lock screen had been, _Edward wrote today, training is going..._ It’s enough to see to know that she doesn’t need to read it. 

The night is muggy and still beyond Gene’s open bedroom window. She falls asleep listening to the calling of foxes, and dreams blissfully of nothing at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for reading! :~~~~)


	4. Chapter 4

It rains hard all weekend. Gene’s grandpa paces around and moans about his trick knee, which always acts up in the weather, while she sits at the kitchen table and glues glitter to foam letters.

“I’m regressing,” she tells him. “Grandpa, I remember doing this sorta stuff right here when I was eight.”

“And you’re just as cute as you were then,” he says, absently. Eggs sizzle in the pan over the heat. Gene is keeping an eye on the salt cellar near his hand. 

The rain stays through Saturday, and Sunday too; thick sheets of it that drum against the roof and worm right on through to Gene’s brain. Even though she knows Murrays isn’t open on weekends, she still keeps an eagle eye on her phone, hoping for a text to come through to tell her that her truck is back working and she won’t have to slog her way through the rain to work. For the first time, Gene regrets not taking Merriell up on her offer to ferry Gene around. What was a fleeting moment of pleasure at surprising somebody, compared to showing up with all the stupid flyers and posters she’d been working on, turned to mush in her bag? 

She goes running in it on Sunday evening, down into the trails where the trees overhead keep the rain from her a little. It’s still hot out despite the weather; the rain warm when it runs down her back. The trails are lush and alive, fragrant from the rainfall after so long spent drying out in the heat. Gene takes deep lungfuls of it; that earthy, fresh scent of a wet forest. It’s coming down thickly when she emerges, slick with rain, water running into her mouth and her eyes. 

“Jesus,” her grandpa says, when he sees her. And then he laughs. “Only a miracle’s gonna keep you dry tomorrow morning, Genie.”

As it happens, Gene doesn’t need a miracle. She just needs one girl with a sixth sense and a reliable old car from the nineties.

Eight a.m sharp, and Merriell is grinning lazily at Gene from the porch. Shoulder to the doorjamb, the toe of her boot just flirting with being inside the house. Gene, clutching a roll of construction paper to her chest and still just barely awake, stumbles so hard over a sentence that she just gives up. 

Her grandpa is beaming between the both of them. He’d been the one to open the door at Merriell’s knock, and the one to boom through the house, “Genie, that girl from the garage is here!” Gene can’t tell which of them looks more pleased. 

Merriell’s wearing a white t-shirt so thin that Gene can see the dark, indistinct shape of a tattoo between her tits. “What are you doin’ here?” she manages, but it’s so early that her brain only has room for one action at a time. Her eyes stay glued to Merriell’s small, rain-spotted tee. Behind her, the rain is so heavy it looks like a wall; the open door lets in the smell of it, the sound of it. 

A ring of keys rattles into sight, as Merriell spins it lazily on her finger. “Figured you needed a ride.” Her eyes flick to the papers clutched to Gene’s chest, and her smirk grows. “Art project?”

“What?” Gene says, and then, “What?” 

She doesn’t even have it within her to be embarrassed that Merriell is seeing all the old people shit in the house, or the gross old slippers that Gene wears inside. Her grandpa in his old man pyjama set with that robe that Gene has been trying to throw out since she moved in. It doesn’t matter. Merriell is smiling at her, eyes playful under that bird’s nest of curls, and Gene suddenly doesn’t care about any of it.

“Fine,” she says, and dumps all the things in her arms onto the kitchen table as she begins the hunt for her shoes. “Come inside, outta the rain.”

The boot that had been flirting with the threshold finally makes it over. Gene’s grandpa goes back to the TV. The sound of the rain is quieter with the door shut; the kitchen seems to shrink to the size of pinhead as Merriell takes a couple steps further into the house.

“I always wondered what these places looked like on the inside,” she says, absently. Gene looks up from where she’s lacing her shoes to see Merriell nudge her knuckle against a picture frame, knocked off-centre. It straightens. Gene’s grandparents beam out from the old photograph. 

“Well, don’t look too hard,” Gene says, cautiously. 

“Why not?” Merriell has her hands behind her back, examining the photographs on the wall with intent, now. “It’s nice. Nicer than my place.” One dirty-nailed finger jabs at a family photograph of the lot of them; Gene’s grandparents, her parents, her and Edward. “This your mom?”

“Sure,” Gene says, joining Merriell in the hall as she pulls her coat from the rack. “Don’t you remember her yellin’ at your brothers once?”

“Nah, but I guess they deserved it.” Her smile is whip-sharp. “She’s pretty.”

Rolling her eyes, Gene calls, “Grandpa, I’m off!” over her shoulder, before inclining her head towards the door. Merriell is still watching her, eyes bright.

“Got everythin’?” she asks, eyes flicking to the banner in Gene’s hands again. They’re standing close together in the narrow strip of hallway between living room and kitchen, all eras of Gene looking on from the photographs. So close that Gene can smell the peppermint chewing gum that Merriell jaw is working around. Teenage girl shit. Probably covering up the smell of cigarettes. She smells like no perfume beyond that; no artifice. Just rain-wet skin and damp, curling hair, warming up and drying now that she’s in the muggy heat of the house. 

A dark eyebrow raises. Gene watches Merriell push the chewing gum between her front teeth, and snap it. 

“I’ve got everythin’,” Gene breathes, but together they spend a minute wrestling a trash bag over the bulky shape of the banner for the library. 

Once safe in Merriell’s car, they sit for a second; gathering themselves after the dash from porch to car, the fumble to unlock it, throwing themselves inside. The rain beats against the roof, against the windscreen, so heavy that it looks like they’re going through a car wash. Any second now, Gene expects the suds to hit. 

“Why didn’t you just text me?” she asks the deluge, flattening itself against the windscreen before running off to drown the gutters. She’d had to step over it to get in the car, soaking her sneaker in the process. Churning grey water. _The backyard is gonna be flooded_ , she frets, absently. 

Merriell, who is lighting up a cigarette to fog the close space, grunts. “My phones ain’t reliable,” she mutters, and Gene thinks, _phones? Plural?_ “You want a cigarette?” she adds, and Gene turns her head to eye the house, barely visible through the rain. It looks half-sunk underwater from the run-off coming from the car’s roof; wavering and indistinct.

“Sure,” she says, and Merriell hands her one. She has to duck her head close to the other girl to get it lit; Merriell won’t extend the lighter any further than over the centre console. When Gene rises back up, she’s grinning, green eyes alight in the gloom. 

“Let’s get goin’ then,” she mutters, and shows Gene all her teeth. 

The drive isn’t long. Not long enough for a Tracey Chapman song, right? Gene spends the three minutes or so gradually waking up and coming to her senses as Merriell smokes, and flicks through radio stations. 

She’s not completely sure what to make of this. The car ride isn’t long enough to figure it out. Merriell’s brusque over-familiarity in showing up unannounced to give Gene a ride isn’t quite what she’d expected, and now she doesn’t know what to do with it. _Maybe she got tired of waiting_ , Gene thinks, throwing Merriell a sidelong look. She has the window open a tiny crack to let the cigarette smoke escape; rain is flecking the steering wheel, the bare skin on her arms. Gene’s eyes glue to the tattoo on Merriell’s bicep, revealed when she lifts her arm to ash her cigarette out of the window. A coy cowgirl smiles back. 

“You’re quiet,” Merriell says, suddenly. The radio has lapsed into a low mumble under the rush of rain, of tires on wet asphalt. Gene detaches from the tattoo to find Merriell looking at her, and again Gene is struck by how easily all the disparate features of her face come together; into something striking, something just toeing the line of pretty. The thick black brows, the feline sweep of her cheekbones and jaw, that mouth that’s more sulky than sensual. 

“You’re drivin’ slow,” Gene counters with, because it is barely past eight a.m after all, and she can’t come up with anything smart. She watches the plush pout of Merriell’s mouth part in a grin as she turns back to the road. 

“Okay, boss,” she mutters. “All business, huh?”

“Well, ain’t this business?” Gene asks, feeling brave. Merriell’s glances at her, sidelong. Her cigarette sheds ash as she shifts her hands on the steering wheel, the car turning onto the road on which the library sits. 

“You tell me,” she murmurs, and the butterflies in Gene’s stomach wake up all at once. 

She takes a drag from his cigarette just to try and settle them, but it only serves to make them roil more. The long muscles in Snafu’s arms shift smoothly under her skin as she drives, eyes on the road, the hand holding the cigarette resting on her thigh now. Gene can’t stop looking at her. Can’t stop turning Merriell over in her own mind. She wants to ask her how she’s been, ask her what she’s been up to in the ten years since Eugene had seen her last. Wants to know why she never left Sytwell, or if she did, why she returned. So many questions she can’t pull them all out to examine them; and can’t voice them for fear of breaking the comfortable silence between them. Half-heartedly, she wishes that she and Merriell were complete strangers. That Merriell hadn’t seen her in all her awkward on-the-brink-of-teenagerhood glory. But she can’t change it. The truth is, Merriell knew her then and still came out in the rain on a Monday morning to take her to work, without being asked. Gene’s not sure even she would do something like that for someone. 

Merriell pulls the car up to the curb, the library a squat, indistinct figure through the rain. Gene’s boss hasn’t turned the main lights on yet; the only light is the vague amber square of the office. Gene turns to look at it, trying to think of the right thing to say to Merriell, suddenly awkward and unsure how to thank her.

“Hey.” Merriell’s voice is soft, and when Gene turns to look at her, she’s leaned across the centre console, her hair in her big pale eyes. Her hand comes up, and Gene feels herself go stiff as dizzying surprise rips through her. She feels like a rabbit in the headlights, entranced by the way Merriell’s hair has dried; one errant curl flirting sweet and dark with the corner of her mouth. _Is she gonna kiss me?_ her mind screams, as Merriell moves closer, as her fingertips touch Gene’s cheek — 

— And then come away.

Grinning, Merriell shows Gene the tip of her finger. A speck of glitter winks back. “You’re covered in this shit,” she mutters, and brushes it off on her shirt, thumb coming up to rub at Gene’s cheekbone. “And here I am gettin’ covered in _oil_ all day,” she adds, rolling her eyes as she leans back to her side of the car.

Gene stares at her. Her cheek feels hot where Merriell had touched it. Her brain is flatlining. “Okay,” she mutters, feeling her face flush hotter and hotter by the second. Fuck. She needs to get out of this car, out of the concentrated smell of Merriell that clings to it. Jerkily, Gene grabs at her backpack, grabs at the banner in its black trash bag, mind working on pure animal autopilot as she tries hard to switch gears. Impossible. She’s gonna have to sit through eight hours of hyperactive kids with her brain all mired down in _this_ before she can go home and go run this feeling out of herself. 

“Gene —‘

“Thanks for the ride,” Gene says, hurriedly, as she opens the car door. The sound of the rain rushes in, the fresh wet air cutting through the atmosphere inside. The sight of it falling in sheets outside makes her hesitate, brace herself to go into it, and as she does so, Merriell’s hand catches on her forearm. 

“I’ll pick you up after work.” It’s not a question. Gene couldn’t read the expression on Merriell’s face if she tried. 

Finding her voice, Gene mutters, “Okay, fine.” She thinks of the touch of Merriell’s hand to her face. “You don’t have to.”

Merriell sinks back into the drivers seat, that easy air of confidence lingering back over her again. She smiles, and shrugs, fingers grasping idly at the bottom of the steering wheel. “I want to,” she says, and Gene doesn’t know how to respond to that so she doesn’t. Just bids Merriell goodbye and forces herself out into the rain, mind so jumbled up and twisted around that she has to double back to snatch her banner from a laughing Merriell, hanging out of the passenger side window. 

“You get a new car?” her boss asks, after Gene fights her way inside, face red hot and embarrassed and wet with rain. He’s stood behind the desk, a stack of books in front of him and a curious expression on his face. Oliver; mid-thirty, soft around the middle. He’s been trying to get Gene to go for a drink with him after work for months. How he doesn’t know that she’s gay is beyond her; at this point it feels more like a wilful ignorance.

“Got a lift,” she says, shortly. He’s not a bad boss, just a nosy one. It doesn’t pay to give him any more insight into one’s life than is needed. They have a tenuous sort of relationship — Gene is sure he knows that she’s one more invitation to a bar away from emailing HR. It levels the employee-boss playing field, to have that power. 

“Cool,” he says, unconvincingly, and rounds the desk to inspect the banner that Gene is pulling from the dripping trash bag. “Oh, Gene, looks great.”

“Uh huh,” she says, and leaves him with it, bundling the wet trash bag into her fist as she drops her backpack behind the desk, and then disappears into the office. 

Inside is an old leather sofa, a coffee table, the overflowing lost property. Mini-fridge, microwave, kettle; mirror. Gene blinks at herself in it, trying to smooth her hair down from where the the rain has caught it and sent it wild. Her cheeks are two bright spots of colour in her otherwise pale face. 

She imagines Merriell looking at her; tries to see herself how Merriell might. All Gene can see is her own wide eyes. The glitter in her hairline, smeared into the creases of her face. When she turns to the side, the light catches them, and lights her up. Could Merriell be watching her just as she watches Merriell? The thought is almost laughable. Almost. 

The touch of her fingers still lingers. Tingling like a slap. _You're lovesick_ , Gene thinks, blinking at her reflection. _Do you really need to get laid so bad?_

She does, a little bit. She's only human, and Merriell really does smell that good. 

Work passes slowly, and without note. Gene spends her break half reclined on the sofa in the break room, thinking about the choices that she will be faced with when she gets back in Merriell's car in just a few hours. She'd forgotten her lunch in her haste to get Merriell and her grandpa away from each other. All she has is her thoughts. 

She knows Merriell's type. The girl will ask her for drinks, which will mean beers from the fridge in her house. After that, they'll probably make out, and have sex. A couple days later Gene will have to pick up her truck from the lot all shamefaced, and they'll never really talk again. It's a real testament to Gene's loneliness that the whole thing doesn't actually sound too bad. Hell, it's a better night than watching M*A*S*H reruns with her grandpa.

Gene is sure she has Merriell all figured out, which is why it comes as such a complete shock when Gene gets into her car after work, and Merriell turns to her with a, "What's your favourite spot here?" 

She's changed her clothes. The car smells different. Less like cigarettes and more like...perfume? Something woody and spicy, musky. The kind of warm smell that makes Gene want to lean in and find out exactly where on Merriell's skin she'd sprayed it. 

"What?" Gene asks, positively bedraggled after a day corralling children all cooped-up after a weekend of rain. "What d'you mean?"

The car is idling; the radio playing on low, cool air coming from the fans to stir Merriell's curls. The summer evening is so rainy that the interior of the car is almost dim. Merriell's cigarette makes a trail from the steering wheel, to her mouth. "What, you don't wanna go for a drink?"

"I didn't know that was part of picking me up," Gene lies. The smile Merriell levels her with is knowing. 

"Okay," she says, and drops her eyes to her lap. Brushes some cigarette ash into a grey smear on her pants. "You wanna go for a drink, Gene?" Somehow, she manages to make it sound like she doesn't care whether Gene says yes or no. Like she isn't wearing real clothes and perfume for a reason. Gene kinda misses the dickies. 

"Well." Gene pretends to think about it. She'd rehearsed it earlier, lying on the break room sofa with her stomach growling. "I ain't exactly dressed for someplace nice."

"Then ain't you lucky that Sytwell don't have anyplace nice," Merriell says, a smile in her voice. Gene casts her a long-suffering glance, to which her smiles widens at. "C'mon, you got other plans?" she asks. 

In the break room, Gene had stared at the water-stained ceiling and said to herself, _turn her down once, then accept the second time_. Only now that she's here, Merriell's perfume in her nose like a reminder of just how completely attracted to her she is, Gene is finding it difficult to follow through. 

"I don't know anyplace good," she blurts. Break-room-Gene will just have to understand. "I ain't been out once."

Merriell throws her head back and laughs, like that's the funniest thing she's ever heard. "You're kidding," she mutters, under her breath. She shifts in her seat, hand going for the gearstick between them as she adds, "What, your granddaddy keep you locked up to wash his underpants?" She laughs again. Gene kisses her teeth. 

"You got a place in mind?" she asks, and catches the sly look that Merriell sends her way.

"Sure. Ain't far from me. You mind if I drop the car off?" 

And there it is. Gene's surprise had just been a little premature. The place that Merriell has in mind is without a doubt her sofa, a fan beating just ineffectually enough nearby to keep them both sweating. Again, Gene has to admit it doesn't sound that bad. She takes a glance at Merriell from the corner of her eye as they pull away from the curb; the easy way she's slouched in her seat, hands barely making contact with either wheel or gearstick as they glide through the rain-washed streets. The window is open just a fragment, just like earlier; the smell of the rain on the concrete is so thick in the car that it overpowers Merriell's perfume, or maybe just mingles with it. Gene takes a deep breath in, and wonders after that tattoo she had seen through Merriell's shirt that morning. Wonders after the hair on her stomach, on her arms. Wonders wonders wonders, until they're pulling up outside Merriell's house and the girl is looking at her expectantly, and Gene is having to reign herself in.

"You think so loud I swear I can hear it," Merriell tells her. Gene runs a hand self consciously through her hair; dried fluffy and sticking up everywhere from her brush with the rain that morning. 

"I'm glad you can't," she says, and silence drops between them. Without the noise of the idling car, there's only the rain, only Gene's own breathing, her pulse in her ears. The moment stretches, malleable and sticky like taffy, like honey. Dimly, she searches for something to say. Merriell beats her to it.

"I bet," she mutters, and then rips her keys from the ignition, the keychains jangling. "C'mon, you okay to walk?"

Doubtfully, Gene glances out into the rain. It's lighter than it had been earlier in the day, but still enough to soak. She hadn't really expected Merriell to actually make her walk in this. "Is it far?" 

"You know Dukes'?” she asks. Gene shakes her head, and Merriell shrugs. "Well, it ain't far."

Gene leaves her bag in the footwell of Merriell's car, after only a second of hesitation. It reminds her of that episode of _Seinfeld_ , in which George admits to leaving things at women's houses just for an excuse to go back. If Merriell notices, she doesn't mention it. Just slams the car door and waits expectantly on the sidewalk for Gene to join her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading!! and thank you all so much for all your lovely comments (and kudos, bookmarks, etc!) over the past few weeks. i've had a pretty distracting end to the month (dissertation deadline for my masters programme, plus moving house like 8 hrs away lol) so this fic has been on the backburner a little bit, and i haven't written in a good long while. so it's just so nice to see an email notif for a comment, it's really been reminding me why i enjoy writing this fic so much! so thanks again, and i hope you all enjoy this chapter too :~) i'll be back to writing and everything else soon, i hope!
> 
> also, i had to cut this chapter off a little awkwardly. sorry about that! it's a long segment lol


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i cut the last chapter off a little awkwardly (i keep writing like 10k word scenes and self-sabotaging my previously neat chapters) so it might be helpful to glance over the last couple paragraphs of chapter 4! and of course this chapter is cut off weird too, because of course

She joins her. They walk close together, shoulders occasionally bumping whenever Gene skirts something in her way, or Merriell stumbles into her. She can't seem to walk in a straight line. It's a quirk that shouldn't be as endearing as it is. All around them, Sytwell is hushed and still, dark from the rain clouds and shining with wet. It’s a light mist coating every inch of them both; Gene’s face feels soaked with it.

After a minute, Gene mutters, "Merriell, this is miserable," and the girl laughs that loud brash laugh again. Gene can't help from laughing too, blinking rain from her lashes. Some first date, if she can even call it that.

"You ain't sugar," Merriell says, playfully, nudging her elbow at Gene's side. "Won't melt."

"You don't know that," Gene counters with, and Merriell just snorts. She can't smoke a cigarette in the weather, and it seems to be making her hands nervous; unsure. Gene watches her pick at her cuticles, bite her fingernails, and then stuff them back into her pockets. The noise of the rain hitting the sidewalk is a good replacement for conversation. Somehow, Gene feels less awkward than she had in the car. She wonders if Merriell had known she would, but thinks that might be a little impossible. 

There's a reason why Gene has never heard of Duke’s before, being as tucked away down by the train tracks as it is. She's never even run this far. Sytwell is one of those small towns that was a suburb first, and became a town second. It means a lot of its bars were once houses; the two-up-two-down builds that were easy to throw up, and presumably easy to throw down. Inside, they're all basically the same. The sharp, hoppy smell of beer practically soaked into the wood-panelled walls, and definitely soaked into the thin, scuffed-up carpets. Booths with cracked vinyl seats, vomiting foam. Pool tables that have seen better days, a dart board that old men will half-heartedly have a go at once all conversation has been exhausted. Low lighting, low ceilings, low standards. 

Gene knows she's a Sytwell girl at heart by how much she adores them. 

She can feel Merriell's eyes on her as she holds the door open for Gene to step inside, and Gene wonders what she sees there. Her grandpa always says she's an easy read, but she doesn't know if that's because he's been reading her face since birth or not. Can Merriell see she's pleased? Even with her thin button-up sticking to her skin from the rain, even though her hair is dripping water down her back.

Someone whistles when Merriell and Gene step up to the bar, the noise cutting sharp through the music like a hot knife through butter. Both of them turn to look; Merriell flips off whoever had whistled. The bar is dim, and noisy. Gene can't work out which group of guys it had been.

"D'you know them?" she asks Merriell, who has already turned away back to the bar. 

"Somethin' like that," she says, and then as the bartender approaches, "Usual, Burg. And whatever my friend likes."

The bartender peers down at her, and then glances to Merriell, who Gene thinks is looking very pointedly in the other direction. "Sure," he says, and grabs at a beer glass. "What'll you have?" he asks Gene, and levels her with a contagious smile. He’s got a nice face; thick dark brows over blue eyes. "Snaf's got a tab goin' here that's almost older than her, have whatever you like."

Gene pulls a face. "Older than --"

"It's my daddy's," Merriell butts in, flashing wide eyes at the bartender, who is laughing. "Some people inherit money when their parents die. I inherited his bar debt."

"Oh," Gene says. The bar top is sticky and smooth all at once under her hands. The bartender pulls Merriell's beer, and then looks expectantly to her. "Whiskey sour, please."

He grins. Merriell does too. Somehow, Gene feels like she's passed some test she was never aware she was taking.

Gene shrugs out of her wet shirt as soon as she and Merriell slide into a booth at the back of the bar; the material is clinging and cold, and incredibly uncomfortable in the bar's A/C. Underneath she wears only a thin white undershirt, to which Merriell's eyes drop to before flicking away. Fighting the urge to feel self-conscious about how hard she knows her nipples are, Gene reaches for her drink, eyes scanning the smoky room. Opposite her, Merriell pulls her cigarettes from her back pocket. A lighter follows, and then her car keys. Gene eyes the collection, and snorts.

"You really weren't joking about the phone, huh?"

Merriell smiles, eyes squinting as she takes a sip of her beer. "We have a love-hate relationship," she says, and leaves it at that.

"So who whistled?" Gene asks, before too much dead air can form between them. She's becoming aware that Merriell is not much of a conversationalist. "And why'd the guy at the bar call you 'Snaf'?" 

"Ha," Merriell says, and her eyes flick towards the bar, a smile tugging at her mouth. "That's his stupid nickname for me." She waits a beat, and when Gene doesn't pick up on it she extrapolates. "Like, 'SNAFU'? Y'know?"

Gene does know, actually. She eyes Merriell, and then laughs. "Really?" she asks, grinning. Merriell tosses her hair back from her face, and rolls her eyes.

"I said it was stupid, didn't I?" She slips a cigarette from the pack, and lights it before nudging it towards Gene. "And the guy who whistled was my dumbass friend." She shakes her head. "Don't worry 'bout it."

"You hang out here a lot?" Gene asks, and leans over the table for Merriell to light her smoke. "Thanks."

She shrugs one shoulder; effortlessly attractive in her clean little tee, her curls drying wild from their walk in the rain. "Sure," she mutters, and takes a drag from her smoke. "Not a lot else to do."

Finally, an excuse to ask the question that's been going around in Gene's head for a week. "So how come you’re still kickin’ ‘round here?”

The lights glance off the gold rings in Merriell's ears as she throws her head back to laugh. "Not all of us have parents who'll move us to the city," she mutters, throwing a sly glance Gene's way. Her fingertips flirt with the rim of her glass.

Gene swallows, feeling prickly about the implication that she wanted that. "I didn't ask them to," she counters with, and Snafu hums. Again, that smile that's not a smile. Gene feels captivated by her, enthralled. Her deep suntan catching the low light of the bar, taking it in, making her glow. From her earrings to her necklace to the rings decorating her fingers. Gene wants to be on the same side of the table as her, wants to be able to smell that musky perfume on her skin. 

She watches as Snafu nudges the tip of her cigarette to the edge of the ashtray, upsetting the growing pillar of ash there. It falls. The smoke winds up to the ceiling, a never-ending thin grey thread. Snafu clears her throat, and says, "I like it here." She sucks on her cigarette, eyes downcast. "Don't take a lot to make me content. I know that's gonna make me sound like a hick, but," she shrugs. "Someone's gotta stay in the town they was born in, or else there won't be anybody to live in 'em."

There's a beat of silence that the jukebox covers up neatly. Someone's put the Rolling Stones on, one of their bluer songs. Gene feels herself fall a little harder for Merriell. "You're right," she says, and Merriell's eyes flick up to meet her own. Reserved, none of that usual playfulness. Gene guesses this is something she really feels strongly about. She almost feels bad, for expecting this night to go the way of fridge-chilled beers and a quick fuck on the couch. "I can see how you can love Sytwell."

Merriell tips her head to the side, curls shifting with the movement. Her thumb presses to her lower lip, mouth curling in a smile. "So what's keepin' you from lovin' it here?" 

Put on the spot, Gene's first reaction is to make a joke. Brush it off. Say something about her weird boss or living with her grandpa, or about all the stores closing at six every evening. Plenty of annoying things about Sytwell to chose from. But Merriell's honesty in her own answer stops her. Makes her consider the question, makes her think of a way to express the bone-deep discontentment that's only been growing since she moved here.

"It ain't what I had planned," she settles with, to start. "So it doesn't feel like I chose to be here, really. That's what makes the difference, I think."

Merriell hums, and nods, chewing that over. "There's a lotta things that happen that we don't plan," she says. Her beer has left a ring of condensation on the wood; Gene spots it when she lifts it to take a long drink from it. She fights the urge to reach across to smear it with her fingertips. 

Gene shrugs, and nods. "You ain't wrong." She takes a mouthful of her drink, and lets the whiskey warm her from the inside out. One more of these, and she'll feel less self-conscious about her damp undershirt. About how Merriell's eyes linger on her in ways that make her face feel pink. "Maybe I'll come 'round to this place."

Merriell smiles, chin propped on her hand. "How can I convince you of Sytwell's charm?" she asks, and laughs when Gene snorts. "What, you think it ain't got charm?" 

"It's definitely got somethin'," Gene says, dryly, and laughs again at Merriell's noise of mock-affront. "Okay, you tell me what you think is charmin'." 

"I know everybody," Merriell says, immediately. She takes her chin from her hand, and begins to count on her fingers. "So that's one thing. Two, we ain't got all those big businesses or Starbucks or whatever --"

"-- And that's a good thing?" Gene interrupts. Merriell rolls her eyes.

"Don't interrupt. Three, the trails are pretty and not jammed up with tourists. Four, people don’t come here, five —”

"Alright, alright." Gene is laughing, waving her hand. "I get it."

Eyes alive in her face, grinning, Merriell says, "I could go on."

"I'll let you tell me another time," Gene says, and that seems to please her well enough. Merriell sits back in the booth, taking her beer with her. Her eyes flick over Gene, something thoughtful on her face. "What?" Gene asks, the alcohol loosening her tongue. Having missed lunch and now dinner, the maraschino in the dregs of her whiskey sour is beginning to look very tempting. 

"Nothin'," Merriell says, then she snorts, and looks away. "Did you ever think we'd be sittin' here sharin' a drink as adults, when you were a kid?"

Gene laughs; the noise too loud, like it had burst out of her. "No," she says, emphatically. "No way. Did you?"

"Nah," Merriell says, but then a smirk tugs at her mouth as her eyes slide back to Gene. "You were a little goody-two-shoes back then. Didn't think you'd ever talk to me unless you had to."

"What?" Gene asks, nonplussed. "What d'you mean?"

Merriell rolls her eyes. "I was the bad kid. You got straight A's. Shit, I'm surprised to see you back in Sytwell at all, let alone in a bar with me." 

Gene blinks at her. "You weren't bad," she blurts. Merriell's brows dip. The whiskey has loosened Gene up than she'd even realised, because the next words out of her mouth are so embarrassing she almost wants to snatch them back as soon as she says them. "Actually, I kinda always wanted to be your friend."

It's so incredibly juvenile that Gene feels herself go red. All the blood climbing into her face, just to make it even more apparent how completely embarrassing she is at her core. After a beat, Merriell laughs, and then keeps laughing, eyes bright with amusement until she covers them over with her hand and they're lost to Gene, who cannot sink lower in her seat if she tried.

"Shut up," she mutters, ineffectually. The jukebox is playing something fast and loud now, and that combined with the chatter of all the people in the bar has Gene drowned out. "Stop, forget I said it!" she insists, once Merriell seems to calm down, mopping at her eyes with her fingers.

"Fuck, that's so cute," she mutters, and shakes her head, eyes still teary from her laughter. "Gene, that's so _cute_."

“Shut _up_ ,” Gene groans, and covers her face with her hands. Elbows to the sticky top of the table. She’s not sure if she’s actually as embarrassed as she probably looks.

A moment later, Merriell pulls Gene’s hands from her face, and Gene drops them easily, faux-sulkily. Merriell is grinning, a Cheshire Cat smile that’s so impish and so pleased that Gene forgets about her embarrassment in favour of being struck by Merriell’s looks again. She fits right into the dark, smoky interior of the bar. The gold at her throat and at her knuckles shining as she leans forward over the table, into the light thrown by the lamp above them.

“I remember when you gave me a drawing,” she hisses, hands knotted together on the tabletop. Her cigarette burns low and absent between her fingers. The grin on her face is sly. “Do you?”

Gene blinks at her, so surprised by the turn in conversation that she forgets to be embarrassed. “I’m shocked _you_ remember,” she says, unable to hide the disbelief in her voice. From the other side of the bar comes the unmistakeable noise of someone starting a game of pool. The clatter of balls, then voices rising in excitement. “You never said anythin’ about it.”

Merriell shrugs one shoulder, eyes roving across the bar as she takes another drink of her beer. Her fingers slide through the ring of condensation it had left, and then she says, “Still have it someone I think.” Her eyes flick to Gene, who tries to school her expression but fails, judging by the smirk that hitches onto Merriell’s face. “Nobody had ever given me nothin’ before.”

“Oh,” Gene says, at a loss for any better reply, and then drains her whiskey sour just to hide her face for a second. Her cheeks feel hot from more than just the alcohol, and hotter still when she looks up from her glass to find Merriell watching her. There’s something distinctly wolfish in her expression, elbows still braced to the table and leaned just so onto Gene’s side of it. 

“You want another?” she asks, and gestures to the empty glass in front of Gene, who follows her gesture dumbly. 

_No,_ her empty stomach thinks. “Yes,” her mouth says. 

Gene eats the maraschino cherry while Merriell is at the bar, and then eats the one that comes in the fresh drink the minute Merriell sets it down. “Thank you,” she says, as Merriell smiles down at her.

“You hungry?” she asks, sliding into the booth with a shot of something dark threatening to spill over her fingers. At Gene’s curious look, she raises it, and smirks. “Jameson.” She chases it with a gulp of beer, and then coughs, wrinkles her nose. Gene laughs at her, sipping at her own drink as she watches Merriell’s hands go for her pack of smokes.

“I can’t believe you still have that dumb drawing of mine,” Gene mutters, as Merriell lights up. “Shit, what would it’ve been, ten years ago?” 

Merriell shrugs, and nods. “Just about.” She drops her lighter back to the tabletop, and takes a long draw through her cigarette. Her smile turns sly behind the veil of smoke as she plucks it from her mouth, and exhales. “So don’t feel too embarrassed about wantin’ to be my friend when we were like, twelve.” 

Gene groans, and rolls her eyes, toying with the plasticky stem of the cherry as she tries to think of a good comeback. The whiskey is hitting her pleasantly, but hard. All she can manage is a lame, “I ain’t that embarrassed,” that Merriell makes a low noise at.

“Neither am I,” she murmurs, and they regard each other from across the table. The low light reflecting back in Merriell’s eyes, the purse of her full mouth around her cigarette. Gene’s heart thumps unevenly in her chest. When she swallows, she can taste the sticky sweetness of the maraschino cherries on the back of her tongue. Under the table, their knees bump. 

“You wanna play pool?” Merriell asks, and Gene nods gratefully. 

Gene’s not good at pool, but what she lacks in skill she greatly makes up for in stubborn competitiveness. It’s not a match to Merriell’s actual pool-playing abilities, but it makes for a fun game. Gene can tell that Merriell must come here a lot; several people greet her, and a few more match their game half-interestedly from the tables nearby. Gene can’t blame them; she’s doing more watching than anything else. The way Merriell’s face looks lit by the pendant light over the table. The way she shifts seamlessly between easy concentration and a wide grin whenever a ball is pocketed, the air of cool confidence about her as she circles the table, cue in hand. Gene finishes her drink, and then drinks the ice water too. Merriell’s beer is long-finished and abandoned in favour of those dark shots of Jameson, which make her touchy and familiar. Hand to the small of Gene’s back as she shifts her to make a shot. Her pale eyes heavy and flashing in the low bar light. Cigarette smoke making a trail behind her as she moves, bends, and pockets a ball in quick succession. 

The cigarette wobbles between her lips with her grin. “What’s that now?” she mutters around it, circling back to nudge at Gene companionably. “I lost count.”

“I dunno how pool is scored,” Gene admits, to which Merriell snorts. “But I think I’m pretty sure you’re winnin’.”

“You might be right,” she drawls, and the casts a critical eye over the table as she plucks her smoke from her mouth. “Fuck it. You dunno the score, neither do I. You want I could teach you how to shoot?” Her eyes settle back on Gene, and stick. Around them, the noise of the bar swells into the beat of silence that follows, as Gene works to unstick her tongue from the roof of her mouth.

She feels warm down to the tips of her toes, flushed from Merriell’s attention. “I’m not gonna be a good aim,” she says, which Merriell seems to take as a ‘yes’. Her eyes light up, a languid smile spreading across her face as she gestures Gene over to her side of the table.

It’s strange, to feel so caught up in an intimate little bubble in a space with so many others jammed inside. The bar has only gotten busier since they arrived; the tables filling up and spilling over to the beer garden, people leaning on the bar and milling in clusters in the middle of the floor. The din of voices, of people shouting over the jukebox and shouting over other people shouting. And right in the middle of it, them. Merriell, smelling like smoke and musky perfume, her mouth close to Gene’s ear as she breathes, “It’s all in the hand you rest the cue on.” The tickle of her curls against Gene’s cheek from their closeness. The warmth of her small body to Gene’s side. 

Blame it on the whiskey, but Gene aches pleasantly between her legs. She’s just drunk enough to not feel embarrassed about it; to not feel embarrassed about anything. She will be tomorrow. Letting Merriell press up against her for anybody to see. But in that moment, Gene would let her do anything. Fuck pool, fuck learning to play it. She’s never tasted Jameson before. As Merriell’s hand covers hers, and urges her to nudge the ball with the cue, she imagines tasting it for the first time in the girl’s mouth. 

“Am I gettin’ better?” she asks, and wonders what she smells like to Merriell. Close to her ear, Merriell snorts.

“Not exactly,” she says, which is actually quite generous, and then moves away. Takes that heady, intoxicating smell of her hair and her perfume away. The warm weight of her body. When Gene looks to her, Merriell is watching her with something thoughtful in her eyes. “Another drink?” she asks, before Gene can speak. The corner of her mouth lifts. “Y’know, there’s a real sweet spot with pool.”

Gene swallows. Her tongue feels thick, and stupid. “Oh yeah?” 

“Sure. Three drinks in, four.” Her smile widens to show her teeth. “You lose your inhibitions I guess.”

“Well,” Gene says, and Merriell’s eyes dip to her mouth. “I better get another drink then.”

Dimly, Gene knows that she’s gonna regret this in the morning. Letting Merriell light her cigarette, letting Merriell take a sip from her drink, hand at Gene’s waist like a little brand. She’ll be hungover. She’ll be tired. Those won’t even be the least of her problems.

The bar continues to swell around them, livelier as the night draws on. The music, the din of voices. The clatter of the balls when Merriell breaks them, and then sends two into the pockets in quick succession. Flash of her smile across the table, flash of her rings in the pendant light that illuminates it. Gene’s heart feels like someone’s tried to tug it out of her throat, but then quit halfway through. Throbbing behind her tonsils, no matter how much whiskey she washes down over it. When she speaks, she feels like Merriell can tell. Her voice is husky. Merriell won’t stop touching her. Waist, elbow, shoulder.

Ineffectually, Gene attempts to pocket a ball. Merriell’s laughter at the wide berth the black gives Gene’s target carries over the low roar of noise. 

“You’re drunk,” Merriell accuses. Her hair has gotten wilder and wilder as the night’s worn on. Gene wonders if her friends are still around. Wonders if they’re watching Merriell and Gene together, wonders what they make of her. 

A beat too late, Gene replies, “I am not drunk.” Carefully, carefully. Her tongue’s been replaced by a piece of carpet. Merriell laughs at her, so hard that Gene can see the dark fillings in her molars. 

The rain has eased off since they’ve been inside. Together, they step out into the warm night, the door shutting behind them and muting the noise inside the bar. Curiously, Gene slips her phone from her pocket to work out just how long she and Merriell have been together, shutting one eye as she fights to make sense of the numbers. 

“Oh my god,” she mutters, and Merriell makes a curious noise. “It’s past midnight.”

Merriell is turned into the side of the building, brows drawn down and mouth pursed around a cigarette she’s trying valiantly to light. Rolling the flint over and over, until at last a flame leaps forward just big enough for her to suck on. Plucking her cigarette from her mouth with a sigh, Merriell says, “Not bad at all.”

The time had slipped by so easily that Gene hadn’t even thought about it. And although she’s sure her empty stomach and the drinks that Merriell had been plying her with might’ve had something to do with that, Gene doesn’t think those were the only reasons. 

Merriell, lounging against the wall now, is looking at Gene from under her lashes. Dark hair and pale eyes and a face of shadows, stood just outside of the pool of light thrown by the door. For a dragging, pregnant pause neither of them say anything. The noise of the inside fills the space in their conversation; muffled laughter, and music. Merriell takes a drag from her cigarette, the light breeze stirring her curls, stirring her cigarette smoke away from them both. 

Gene speaks first. “What now?” She feels less drunk than she had inside. The street smells clean and earthy, wet concrete after rain. She hadn’t realised how close and hot the inside was until now; breathing in the cool, fresh night air. Merriell seems sharper too. It’s all in her eyes; Eugene watches them drop, follows her gaze to watch Merriell’s index tap at her cigarette. Ash flutters to the floor. 

“I’ll walk you home,” Merriell says, simply, and glances up at the sky as she takes a drag from her smoke. Bold now that she’s unwatched, Gene lets her eyes linger on the planes of the girl’s face, sharp and feline and framed by her wild curls. 

“Home,” she echoes, and Merriell’s eyes slide to meet her own. Again, that expression from before. That smile that’s not quite a smile.

“Did you have somethin’ else in mind?” she asks. The gap between them suddenly seems to yawn with how huge it is. Merriell hugging the wall. Gene lingering at the curb.

“I thought you might,” she says, and Merriell laughs. A surprised little sound, like it was forced out of her. Her eyes widen, smoke streaming from her nose as her smile turns wicked.

“Did you?” she murmurs, fingertip tapping idly to the butt of her cigarette as they regard each other from opposite sides of the sidewalk. There’s a beer sign pulsing neon above the door, casting the side of Merriell’s face in its light. Pink, and yellow. Her eyelids dip, slowly. Gene feels drunk again, though she feels it has less to do with the three whiskey sours and more to do with Merriell’s pale gaze needling her in place.

She looks pretty in that pink neon. The sulky, sensual smudge of her mouth in the dark street. The way she runs her fingers through her hair to push it away from her face. The coquettish bust tattooed on her bicep smiles through the night at Gene, who can’t keep from blurting, “So did you?”

Merriell stops her cigarette butt to the floor, and grinds it out with the toe of her boot. “No,” she says, but her grin softens the reply a little. “You’re too damn drunk.” Gene blinks at her, shock keeping her stood silent and still even as Merriell pushes off from the wall she’d been leaning against, and turns in the direction of home. “C’mon,” she adds, and tilts her head. “Want a smoke?” 

Gene glances back at the bar, at the flickering neon above the door, the heads she can see through the little round window set in it. Part of her wants to tell Merriell she wants to go back inside. Maybe one more beer, one more drink — 

A glance back at Merriell shows her eyes are soft, and warm. It’s enough to unstick her from the curb, to fetch up to Merriell’s side and mutter, “Yeah, I’ll have a smoke.”

In the morning, Gene knows she’ll be glad at least one of them had some sense. If she’d woken up in Merriell’s bed, head thumping, mouth like a fucking ashtray, Gene would’ve kicked herself for it. She’s never been someone who’s gone home with somebody on a first date. Hell, she doesn’t know if this night is even a date to begin with.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks so much for reading!! :~~)


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> again... last chapter cut off awkwardly lol. might wanna go back for a refresh! enjoy the chapter, and the new rating change :~)

They bump shoulders as they walk home through the dark streets, talking about nothing important. Merriell fills Gene in on a few people they were friendly with in school. Gene tells Merriell a little about her studies. Every so often they pass under a street lamp and Gene looks to Merriell just to try and see her expression, to try and read further into her. Each time, Gene finds Merriell looking right back. Amber in her eyes. And then they pass from under it, and Merriell’s face plunges back into the indistinct dark shapes that the night makes everything, and Gene is left wondering if she saw anything in Gene’s own face in that split second of light. The streets are so silent that their footsteps seem to echo off the buildings, all the windows that turn to mirrors in the daytime like blank black walls in the night. The cigarette Merriell had given Gene is mentholated. Makes the warm night air feel cold in her sinuses as she breathes. 

“I like to run along here and pretend I’m in an apocalypse movie,” Gene admits, as they step from Merriell’s street onto the square that bisects Sytwell’s two sides. Merriell laughs at that, her big loud _ha!_ echoing through the square. Gene grins down at her feet, hands stuffed in her pockets and her bare arm against Merriell’s bare arm. The point where they connect seems alive with electricity, making Gene shiver despite the pleasant temperature. 

“And who’s winnin’?” Merriell asks. Gene makes a thoughtful noise.

“I ain’t ever thought ‘bout it like that, I guess.” They walk in silence for a time, feet scuffing against the sidewalk. Slow as snails. Gene knows it’s not just her trying to make this walk last. Sytwell isn’t a big town. They both seem set to turn a twenty minute walk into an hour. Gene can’t complain about it. A silly question has been trying to worm its way out of her for about ten minutes. She needs about fifty more minutes just to work out if she should let it out or not. 

“I don’t think Sytwell would be a good place for an apocalypse,” Merriell is saying, voice low. She’s toying with her pack of smokes, passing it from one hand to the other. Gene can hear them moving form side to side in the box, the night is so quiet. “They didn’t build enough nuclear shelters in the sixties.”

“Plus there ain’t ever any bread at the store,” Gene mutters, and smiles when Merriell snorts.

“Guess a bunker’s only as good as its pantry.”

They pass the old bookstore, they pass Murrays, all dark and shuttered up for the night. Gene cranes her neck to catch sight of her truck sitting on the lot, but can’t see it. If Merriell notices her looking, she doesn’t say anything. Just plays with her pack of cigarettes, the motion almost nervous, if Gene didn’t know any better.

The question is pressing its little hands to her tonsils. Maybe Gene doesn’t need the extra fifty minutes after all. Maybe if she could just be brave, and just open her mouth to say —

Merriell speaks, startling Gene out of her internal spiral. “Do you still draw?” Her voice is soft. When Gene glances to the side, Merriell’s drawn a cigarette from the pack she’d been playing with. Her eyes are big in her face, and made dark by the night around them. Sweetly curious, nothing teasing in her voice.

They pass under a streetlight. Gene wonders if Merriell sees the question on her face in the light it throws. All she sees in Merriell is open curiosity. She turns her eyes to the dark street before them.

“Not as much,” she murmurs. Their elbows nudge. At Gene’s side, Merriell flicks her lighter, and lowers her cigarette into the flame that springs forth. The smell of it fills the air, and then is whipped away by the slight breeze. The smell of freshly rained-on concrete is replaced in a second by the slightly sweet smell of Merriell’s menthol.

“What changed?” Merriell asks. Gene hums.

“I guess I just got caught up in doin’ other stuff that I was better at.” Here, she laughs. “Guess I thought it was a waste of time.” 

“Nothin’ that makes you feel good is a waste of time,” Merriell murmurs, and Gene hums. 

“Maybe you’re right.” They lapse into silence; Merriell smoking her cigarette, Gene turning that over in her head. She’d never made the conscious decision to quit on art, not in so many words. Instead it was something that just kept getting pushed back and pushed back. Why spend a couple hours on something that was just gonna look pretty in a closed sketchbook, when she could study for next week’s test? She wishes she had the fervour for it that she’d had when she was younger. When making art was less about making it perfect, but making something that felt honest. Something that made her feel happy when she looked it. Something that could connect two once-dispirit people such as her and Merriell, if even for a brief moment. She wonders if Merriell would be taking an interest in her now if it she hadn’t slipped that picture through the vents in her locker. Would they be walking home together, sharing a cigarette and the silence of a town after dark? Every so often their hands brush, just the barest touch. After their drunken closeness in the bar, it’s nothing, but somehow it feels even more significant. Magnified by the darkness, by the fact that they’re the only people walking around Sytwell this late at night.

They’ve made it onto Gene’s street. Four houses down, the bungalow waits squat and expectant with the porch lamp throwing a puddle of light onto the overgrown lawn. At the sight of it, Gene feels herself slow even more. Her grandpa will be up. She desperately doesn’t want the playful third degree she knows that he’ll treat her to when she gets in, not with how drunk she feels from both the whiskey and Merriell’s company. Too unguarded to deal with anybody right now. 

The thought makes her stop. Merriell walks a few steps more, but when she realises that Gene isn’t at her side anymore she pauses, and glances back. Her expression is indistinct. They’re both stood in a pause of dark between two yellow pools of light. “You good?” she asks, re-tracing her steps until she’s standing in front of Gene.

“I —” Gene begins, and then stops. Merriell’s head cocks to the side, birdlike with her dark eyes and her bony hands holding her cigarette close to her mouth. She doesn’t know what she was going to say. She’d just wanted an excuse to not be at home for a heartbeat longer. “I wish you weren’t walkin’ me home,” Gene settles on, and it makes no sense but somehow Merriell seems to get it. She laughs, and her cigarette drifts close to the centre of her face as she takes a drag from it, the cherry flaring so bright her face gets lost behind the light of it. Gene feels like she’s staring down the barrel of something dangerous; red hot and wicked. 

“Is that so?” Merriell asks. Her voice is throaty from the cigarettes they’ve smoked, from talking over the loud music in the bar. Dimly, Gene spares a thought to her neighbours’ houses that they’re paused outside of. Sytwell is populated almost entirely by curtain twitchers. Gene’s sure the only thing saving them both from being watched is that the town is largely populated by geriatrics too. That, and the safety of their spot between streetlights. 

“I’ve been thinkin’ ‘bout you all day,” Gene admits, swayed by Merriell’s closeness, by how she looks in the half-dark. The honesty is coming up inside of her uncontrollably, and she can’t bite back on it if she tried. 

The breeze moves Merriell’s curls, whips her smoke away over her head as it streams from her nose. Slowly, she takes a deliberate step closer. “I know,” she murmurs, her hand crooked by her collarbone, the cherry of her smoke drawing Gene’s eye even as Merriell leans in close and —

Sandalwood. Merriell’s scent. It’s sandalwood, and something floral, but not cloying. Like violets. Gene used to buy this candy when she was a kid; these chalky, pale purple candies that tasted like perfume. If she concentrates hard enough, she can almost taste them now, with Merriell’s mouth pressing softly to her own and urging a small noise up from deep inside her. The girl’s hand is caught around Gene’s wrist. Not clutching her, not grabbing her. Holding Gene still with nothing more than a thumb to her pulse, and a kiss that’s over before it really begins. 

Merriell’s cigarette is back in her mouth before Gene can even catch her breath. A smirk lingers behind it, Merriell’s eyes alight and alive in her face as she makes a small, amused noise. “You’re cute,” she announces, and then laughs. That big laugh ringing out in the quiet neighbourhood. “Shit, you’re cute.”

Gene feels her face flush, belatedly. Like what had just happened had finally caught up to her. Merriell seems to see it dawn on Gene, because she laughs again, eyes curving fondly as she sways close to cup Gene’s face, and kiss her again. This time, Gene has the wherewithal to return it, and they linger there for a while. In their pool of darkness, trading kisses as Merriell’s cigarette smokes away between her fingers. Her hand on Gene’s jaw, tilting her face up as she kisses her slowly, deliberately. The press of her full mouth, the barest dart of her tongue to the swell of Gene’s bottom lip. Gene’s hand circles Merriell’s wrist, though she’s not sure whether it’s to hold her still or pull her in further. The night swells with the smell of the rain-wet world, with the distant noise of car tires on wet asphalt. Gene’s so turned on she feels mindless with it, throbbing between her legs just as she had back in the bar, with Merriell pressed all along her side and whispering in her ear. Somehow, this is just as much of a tease as that was. The slow, chaste kissing. Gene feels intoxicated by it, wrapped up Merriell’s scent, in the way her wild curls tickle Gene’s face.

Across the road, a window bangs shut. Gene leaps away from Merriell, her hand slipping quickly from the loose circle she’d made around the girl’s bony wrist. 

Merriell seems unperturbed by both the noise and Gene’s reaction to it. Her eyes dip, heavy-lidded, as she brings her forgotten cigarette to her mouth to take a drag. Gene swallows, her mouth feeling full and tender. Adrenaline is a sharp zip of energy through her body, shaking the last dregs of her sleepy drunkenness from her system as she stares at Merriell, who has still not spoken.

“Say somethin’,” Gene says, finally. 

The distant streetlight catches in Merriell’s teeth. “Somethin’.”

It’s drizzling again. Had it started while they were trading those tiny, gentle kisses? Gene hadn’t even noticed. She thinks that Merriell could have grown another head and she wouldn’t have noticed. Her whole world had shrunk to the eye of a needle. She wants to go back there so badly it feels physical, a longing like hunger in her chest. 

“Why were you so surprised to see me?” she asks, the question she’d been ruminating over during their walk. It feels right to ask it now. She’s not afraid of sounding stupid any more. 

The glow of Merriell’s cigarette traces a path from her hip to her mouth, and back again. Smoke clouds the air. “Thought you’d be off changin’ the world or whatever smart people do.”

The answer stings a little, though Gene had almost been expecting something in that vein. She touches her mouth. The phantom press of Merriell’s kiss still lingers. “Well, I’m here.”

“For now,” Merriell says, an edge of something teasing in her voice. Gene huffs.

“For now.”

Gene tries her hardest to creep into the house silently, after Merriell bids her goodbye with one last kiss to leave her wanting more. She’s unsuccessful, of course. For an old man with a hearing aid he neglects to change the battery on, her grandpa is preternaturally good at knowing when Gene is trying to sneak around.

“You stink of cigarettes,” he says, a dark shape in the corridor that runs between the kitchen and the living room, all the way to the back of the house. His face is thrown into shadow, but his voice is playful. Gene doesn’t turn the hall light on. Just tries her hardest not to wobble as she bends to tug at her shoelaces with clumsy hands. She hadn’t felt so drunk on the walk home, and Merriell’s kiss had seemed to shake her head entirely of the last of the cobwebs the whiskey had left. But now, in the familiar surroundings of her grandpa’s house, Gene feels drunker then she did back at the bar.

“I went to Duke’s,” she says, very very carefully. Is there anything worse than slurring when trying to pretend you’re not drunk? “You can smoke inside there.”

“Duke’s,” he repeats, and then passes by her to head into the living room. The TV screen is frozen on the DVD menu. As Gene watches, he crouches down next to the player with a grunt, and slips a DVD inside. It whirrs into the silence. Gene swallows.

“Uh huh.” She takes a step past the living room. “Good talk, grandpa. I’m goin’ to bed.”

“Take a painkiller now!” he calls, and his laugh follows Gene down the hall to her bedroom, where she slumps onto the bed in all her clothes, and closes her eyes.

The room spins around her. The bed tilting crazily, like a bucking bronco set to throw her off. Helpfully, her mind supplies her with a completely fabricated image of Merriell riding one of those things. The slip of bar lights over her skin, the shift of muscles, thighs gripping hard to the bull. Gene groans, forces her eyes back open. The spinning slows just slightly. The popcorn textured ceiling shifting above her eyes.

She thinks of the kiss. She thinks of the sheer weight of Merriell’s eyes on her; Merriell’s attention like a fucking anvil dropped right on her. Or maybe something a little less subtle. Subtle as a car crash, subtle as a nuclear meltdown. Gene’s stomach growls. Her clit throbs between her legs. It’s not an easy call to decide which one she’s gonna attend to, though need wins out in the end.

Still dressed in all her clothes, Gene scoots around her bed, making herself comfortable as she works at the stubborn fly on her jeans. Her fingers are useless, she’s so drunk. How had she convinced herself of her earlier sobriety? Fresh air is a hell of a drug. In the end, she gives up; button flies weren’t made for drunken jerk off sessions in mind, that’s crystal clear. Just shoves her hand past her waistband and into her underwear, eyes falling shut as she finds heat, wetness, her clit hard and wanting against her fingers as she presses her hips up into her own touch. The room is still spinning without her eyes to anchor her to the ceiling. Gene doesn’t care. She’s thinking of Merriell’s heat at her side, thinking about her tits in that dirty white singlet she works in, thinking of the cue sliding between her fingers and the focused look on her face as she watches the balls break. Her mouth, her eyes, her hands, her fucking _mouth_ — 

Gene cums hard, and silently, teeth sunk into her lower lip as she twists in her sheets. Toes curling, eyes screwed shut and fingers still working in all the wetness welling up under her clit. Mindless, until she gasps in a shuddery breath and goes limp, eyes springing open to fix back onto the ceiling. Still spinning. Gene shivers involuntarily as she eases her fingers once more over her swollen clit, just to feel it. 

“I’m so fucked,” she tells the ceiling. Hand still down her fucking pants. Down the hall, she can hear the TV playing the _M*A*S*H_ theme tune. 

————

Out of all the things that Gene had expected to happen after their night together, Merriell dropping off the map entirely was not one of them. 

Turning up unannounced to Gene’s house again? Sure, she has precedent in that area after all. Texting her, calling her? Why not, maybe she’d unearthed that rumoured phone. Gene even imagined Merriell showing up to her work, inviting her out for another night of heavy flirting and charmingly chaste kissing. Or something else, something closer to what Gene had been expecting — hoping? — from their night together. The sofa, the sweat, the beers cooled from the fridge. She’s only ever seen Merriell’s house from the outside. Gene wants to poke around inside, wants to know whether Merriell’s home reflects her or shows nothing. She wants to find out what that indistinct tattoo on her sternum is. She simply _wants_.

None of it happens. Instead, Gene rolls into work an hour late following her and Merriell’s night out, hungover and dreading the day ahead, to find her bag sat on her chair. Her boss giving her a look which she’s too hungover to read into. Somewhere in the ditch between curiosity and disapproval. 

“Late night?” he asks, spinning slowly in his seat as she picks up her bag to toss in the break room.

Gene feels that if she opens her mouth, she’ll vomit. As a result, her reply comes out tight, and terse. “Somethin’ like that.”

Silence. Gene peering at herself in the mirror, at her red eyes and blotchy face. _Never drink on an empty stomach again_ , she tells herself. If she makes it through this work day without puking or napping, it’ll be a miracle.

“A girl came by and dropped that off,” her boss calls. Okay, the look was definitely curiosity. It’s bleeding over into his voice. In the mirror, Gene’s eyes roll. 

The day consists of hugging a Gatorade she’d fetched on her way to work to her chest, and alternating between making vague attempts at work, and fielding flashbacks from the night before. Low light reflecting in Merriell’s teeth. The smell of her hair, the curl of her fingers against Gene’s waist. Luckily, the day is a slow one, and gives Gene plenty of time for alternating wallowing with little spots of hope. She’d missed Merriell this morning; she probably had expected Gene to be in work on time. It doesn’t mean they won’t find a way to link back up, right?

Wrong. Almost week passes before Gene hears from her again. Nothing but radio silence, finally punctured by a brief phone call where Merriell tells Gene to come pick up her truck. Her voice low, and distracted. Gene had been able to hear typing in the background, as if Merriell had been doing something else while calling her. It stung, a little bit. Left Gene sitting staring at her phone after they’d said goodbye, second guessing everything that had happened between them that night. Surely if Merriell wasn’t interested, she wouldn’t have kissed her? Over and over, so tenderly it hurt, the two of them squeezed together in that patch of shadow.

Or maybe she would’ve. It occurs to Gene that she does barely know the girl, actually. 

The sun comes back in full force after all that rain, leaving Gene to sweat her way across town to Murrays, head bowed against the heat of it. It’s Saturday, early morning. She’s wearing her running clothes in some vague attempt to try and kill two birds with one stone; get some exercise _and_ get her truck back, though Gene is quickly souring on what had seemed like a good idea at home. Her shapeless, huge old t-shirt, the running shorts with the holes in the seams on her inner thighs. She knows she’s red faced — can feel it prickling her skin, right alongside the sweat prickling her hairline. As she runs past the shop windows in the middle of town, Gene keeps her eyes stubbornly fixed forward, unwilling to face reality and see exactly how she’s gonna be facing Merriell in just a few minutes. 

The strange thing about Sytwell is how static it is. Murrays looks the same as it had when Gene had stopped by with her truck; looks the same as it had when she’d been a kid buying penny candy across the road. The only thing out of place is Merriell, and she’s the first thing Gene spots as she slows to a jog, and then to a walk. Sat out on one of those lawn chairs, ankle propped on her knee and her head resting back against the top of the seat. When she hears the scuff of Gene’s sneakers, her head comes up, expression closed behind a pair of dark glasses perched on her face.

“Hey!” Gene calls, and then feels stupid for it when Merriell does little beyond letting her sunglasses slide down the length of her nose. 

“Hey,” she says, and then nudges the glasses back over her eyes. Shuttering her expression before Gene can even read it. All that’s left is the twist of the girl’s mouth, her teeth worrying at her bottom lip as she regards Gene silently. “Here for the truck?”

Gene blinks. “Yeah,” she answers, taken-aback by the coolness radiating off her. The radio silence was strange, but Gene had half-expected at least some warmth from Merriell once they were face to face. To be met with this odd desultory nothingness now is somehow worse than the silence. 

Merriell leads the way into the office, jamming her sunglasses up her forehead and into her tangle of curls as they transition from the sunlight into the dim room. Gene lingers in the doorway, feeling unsure and awkward, afraid to open her mouth in case something stupid flies out. The fan is clattering away in the corner, just like last time. Weirdly, the nudie calendar has been flipped; Miss August now leers from the cracked concrete wall.

“You flip that thing?” she asks, and Merriell huffs as her eyes follow Gene’s gesture to the calendar. 

“Murray likes to keep the decor fresh,” she jokes. “Can you blame him?”

They laugh, and the awkwardness eases just a little. Gene’s pretty certain it’s all on her. Merriell is rifling through drawers and pulling folders out of nowhere like this is a normal day, and maybe it would be if it wasn’t for how their night together had ended, almost a week ago. 

_Do you remember?_ Gene wants to ask, but doesn’t want to shatter the very delicate peace between her and Merriell. She can still feel the way Merriell had touched her, if she concentrates. Gazing at the side of the girl’s head, Gene wonders if she was so similarly affected by what happened between them. 

“I had a horrific hangover last week,” Gene offers. Merriell glances at her, folder clutched to her chest and Gene’s keys bunched in her fist, expression unreadable, until she laughs. 

“I bet you did,” she murmurs. “I dropped the stuff you left in my car off, but you weren’t at work.”

“I got there late,” Gene says, and Merriell hums. The folder gets slapped down onto the desk, and then Gene is being handed a pen and told to sign _here here and here_. Her keys are warm from Merriell’s hand when the girl passes them over a second later. 

“She’s all fixed up,” Merriell says, crossing her hands over her chest as she slouches against one of the huge metal filing cabinets bracketing her. Helpless to it, Gene’s eyes flick to her throat, to the ragged collar of the little t-shirt she’s wearing. It’s so thin that she can see the tattoo again, can see a dark mole on Merriell’s breast. And then Merriell shifts, and Gene drags herself back to reality, back to Merriell’s face and the smirk that’s dancing around her mouth. 

“Thank you,” Gene stumbles over, the keys clicking together as she squeezes her fist around them. “And —” she hesitates. Merriell waits, patiently, silently, curls stirring in the air the fan shifts in her direction. Gene chickens out. “And thank you for drivin’ me to work,” she finishes with, lamely. Merriell’s mouth tightens, and then goes soft. 

“No problem.” Her voice is distant, polite. Arms still crossed, very clearly not budging from her spot any time soon. Gene shuffles, backed away towards the doorway but not quite ready to go. 

“So I guess I’ll see you around?” she asks, and Merriell’s expression flickers. So fast that Gene doesn’t have a hope of reading it before that careful indifference comes back. But still, it flickered. That must mean something, right? Feeling brave, she adds, “I had a lot of fun the other night.”

The gameshow playing on the fuzzy TV in the corner fills the silence for a minute. Someone is winning a new dishwasher; the audience’s applause is staticky through the old speakers, the announcer’s voice garbled. Merriell’s eyes flick to it, and then back to Gene.

“So did I, “ she says, softly. Then her shoulders tense, drawing up a little as her eyes move over Gene’s face, and she adds, “I’ll be around, as long as you are.”

It’s a weird phrasing, and Gene is halfway to opening her mouth to question it, to probe a little further — but then Murray’s strident voice booms across the yard, and Merriell rolls her eyes, hard. 

“Shelton!” he’s calling, “I ain’t payin’ you to watch TV!”

“It’s got a tape of _one_ episode of _one_ show,” Merriell calls back, unsticking herself from her slouch and shooing Gene through the doorway in one motion. “C’mon, he’s gonna have my ass.” And then, louder, right in Gene’s ear, “I could watch the damn episode in my head while I work, Murray!”

Distantly, Murray yells back, “It’s the principle of the thing!”

Merriell’s hand finds the small of Gene’s back as she hurries her out of the office, fingers bunching once in the sweaty fabric of Gene’s t-shirt, before releasing. Then they’re out into the sunlight, and Murray is standing there with a cigarette in his mouth, eyes squinted against the smoke. Gene feels wide-eyed and pink-faced, hyperaware of Merriell at her back.

“Genie,” Murray says, by way of greeting. “You distractin’ her?” Then he laughs his big, booming laugh as Gene blushes, and Merriell groans behind her. 

“Leave off,” she mutters, digging her smokes from her pocket as she strays away from Gene. “She’s just goin’ now.”

Ignoring Merriell, Murray says to Gene, “Got that truck runnin’.” He grins, plucking his cigarette from his mouth as he does so. “Now I ain’t gonna say I’m a miracle worker —”

Off to the side, Merriell mutters, “I got it runnin’, Murray.”

“ — But I think I might just be a miracle worker, huh?” He laughs again, and Gene goes along with it, inching to her truck as she does so. Behind Murray, Merriell has a sulky set to her mouth, her big eyes following Gene as she makes her escape. Hand crooked close to her face, cigarette smoke curling into her hair. Murray is still talking, even as Gene hops up into the cab of the truck and starts the engine; a glance over his head shows Merriell wandering back to the office, pulling her sunglasses from her hair as she goes.

It’s the last glimpse of Merriell that Gene gets for a while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks so much for reading!!


	7. Chapter 7

Gene’s life settles back into a comfortable routine, now that her truck has been returned. That drive to work, the drive back. Half a snatch of song on the radio. Sometimes, Gene parks the car behind the library and smokes a cigarette in there, all the windows rolled up just so she can hear the end of a discussion on the radio. A/C blasting, crosslegged in her seat waiting for the cigarette lighter to pop up, its wicked red curl. She imagines not going into work, imagines putting the car back into gear and driving to Murray’s. Finding Merriell smoking a cigarette in one of those tattered old lawn chairs. Finding her in the office, or underneath a car, hands black with engine oil that she can smear all over Gene’s nice work clothes.

Gene’s not sure what she’d do after she marched into whatever corner of Murrays Merriell could be in. Still, it’s nice to think about. But then, the cigarette lighter always pops up. She never goes to the garage.

She goes for long runs in the evening, down into the trails so she can be sure she’ll not run into anybody. Just her, and her breaths, and the sound of her feet hitting the ground. The quality of light that evening holds; cool and blue, and darker in the trees. Grainy like old film. Gene spends a lot of time thinking, while running. Going back to that night with Merriell over and over, until the memory is as worn as an old coin turned endlessly through her fingers. The drinks, the conversation, the game of pool. Merriell’s reveal that she had kept Gene’s drawing. The way she had kissed her. The back of her head as she’d turned to go back to the office when Gene had seen her again, like those breathless few minutes together that drizzly night had been nothing. 

Maybe it had been. Maybe it’s all Gene’s fault for reading further into it than the story had pages. And she’s no stranger to flings, no stranger to kissing a stranger and never hearing from them again, but something keeps niggling at her. Like a loose tooth, so loose you can’t stop poking at it with your tongue. She can’t help but think that she and Merriell aren’t done. That there are more pages left to write, so to speak. 

Tonight, she sits with her bare feet in the creek, watching tiny fish flit around her toes. Paused in her run. Her sneakers at her side, socks torn off and balled up inside. Over her head, the trees shift in the breeze, though the world below the canopy is a warm green-smelling pocket of humidity. Gene swishes her feet to watch the fish scatter and then return. Chin to her chest as her heart slows, as her breath evens out. She’s been avoiding the house lately. Her grandpa keeps asking after Merriell. She doesn’t really have the heart to tell him that nothing came of it. 

She’s been feeling lonely a lot, lately. Lonelier even than she had before she’d gotten her hopes up after that night with Merriell. Is there anything worse than getting a taste of what could be? Gene keeps thinking about all the people at the bar, Merriell’s easy familiarity with the bartender, the hints at more friends lurking in the shadows. Sytwell feels so temporary to her now simply because it is; she has nothing to ground her besides Grandpa, and her job. It’s miserable. She wouldn’t know where to start with building up friendships here, and can’t help feeling like the rebuff from Merriell is some cosmic sign not to even try.

Gene huffs, digging her toes into the little rocks that make up the riverbed. Silt clouds the water. She’s never been very good at this. The only thing keeping her from simmering anger at Merriell is the sneaking suspicion that this is all on her. Who had kissed who? Jesus, she was drunk. The t-shirt she’d worn to work and then to the bar afterwards still stinks of cigarette smoke. 

She wonders if it’s time to give it all up. To stop putting her twenties on hold like this. Mooning around the town she grew up in, working a job she’s not interested in, watching movies with her grandpa and smoking secretly in her bedroom at night. The trees overhead whisper in the breeze that stirs her hair, cools her sweat. She couldn’t do it to her grandpa. It’s useless to even get caught up in the what-ifs when she knows they’ll never become more than that. 

Instead, Gene jams her wet feet back into her socks, and gets the mother of all blisters on her big toe in the time it takes her to emerge from the trails. The rub of shoe and sock against unyielding wet skin. She can’t help but think it must mean something, sat crosslegged on the porch with her foot in her hand, prodding it. Grandpa, dozing in the chair nearby. The lawn alive with fireflies, rising from the grass. Gene’s drinking his beer as well as her own. Teeth gritted at the pain from poking at her foot, but fascinated by it in that stupid, hazy, drunk way. 

“Leave it be,” her grandpa grunts, the chair creaking under him as he wakes, and shifts. Gene steals a glance his way, watching him push his hands up under his glasses to rub at his eyes. “If you wanna pop it, then pop it.”

Gene snorts, and turns back to her blister. A moth is fluttering around the porch light; its shadow shuddering over them. “I’ll get gangrene.”

“No you won’t,” he sighs. And then, “Is that my beer?”

The nights have been pleasant since the rainfall a couple of weeks ago. Cooler, bluer, full of fireflies and the shrill sound of cicadas. Gene’s taken to staying out on the porch all night, and Grandpa joins her more often than not. It’s good for him, to not be glued to that TV. Gene sometimes worries that all those WWII documentaries are turning his head. So instead of that they share a drink, and talk. Sometimes she reads a book out loud to him. Sometimes Gene drags an old sketchbook out from her bedroom, and doodles.

Tonight, she’s focused on the blister, and on keeping her mind away from Merriell. The beer is helping with that. By her knee sits her sketchbook, open to a half-hearted sketch that she’d abandoned once it became clear her head wasn’t in the right place for drawing this evening. A bluejay, mid-flight. Gene can’t get the wings right.

“So, you ain’t seein’ Murray’s girl tonight?” her grandpa asks, as Gene pulls a face at the ground. 

“She’s got a name,” she mutters, and picks up her stolen beer just to avoid actually popping her blister. She takes a swig, and meets her grandpa’s eyes over it. “What?”

He lifts his eyes to the roof over the porch. “Nothin’, Genie.” 

Silence falls, broken only by the shrill noise of the cicadas. Gene wants a cigarette, she wants another beer, she wants — 

“She ain’t talkin’ to me,” she blurts. Through the half-darkness, her grandpa’s eyebrows raise. “Merriell,” Gene adds. “She’s not talkin’ to me.”

He hums. “Bad date?” he asks, and laughs at how Gene prickles at the word ‘date’. God, did she ever think she’d be talking about love life — or lack of it — with her grandpa? How completely lame.

“No,” she says, through gritted teeth. “We had a nice time.” This is why she needs friends her own age. Gene half expects her grandpa to tell her to take Merriell out for a fucking malt or whatever it was that people did in the forties.

Instead, he surprises her. “Well maybe she’s waitin’ on you to make a move now.” The chair creaks under him as he shifts, leaning forward to snatch his beer back from Gene, who gives it up easily. “She’s the one who came to fetch you for work the other morning. Maybe she wants you to do somethin’ similar.”

“Huh,” Gene says, and looks back to her blister. Who would’ve thought her old grandpa knew women? “This how you got gramma?”

He snorts, and when Gene glances up at him, he’s smiling, eyes fond. “Oh no, she got me.”

They lapse into silence. It’s the first time he’s made mention of Gene’s gramma in a long time, and Gene isn’t sure how far to take it. Should she reminisce? She’d like to. But grandpa’s eyes are on his lap, picking at the edge of the label on the beer, and Gene decides to steer the conversation helpfully back the way it had come.

“Thanks for the advice,” she murmurs. She still feels a little silly about it, but can’t say her grandpa’s words hadn’t made sense. She heaves a big sigh, shoulders slumping as she turns her eyes up towards the night sky. It’s clear out here, clear as glass. Just her and the stars and him. Gene wonders idly if Merriell is looking out at the sky too. “I guess I never know how to talk to people.”

“Seems to me you’ve talked to her once,” he says. “Now you just gotta do it a hundred more times.” Then he laughs, when Gene groans. He shakes his head at the noise. “Now if it were that bad, you wouldn’t wanna talk to the girl at all.”

“I guess,” Gene grumbles. Then she snatches at her sketchbook, and heaves herself up from the floor. “I’m goin’ to bed,” she says, because she’s gasping for a cigarette, and maybe another beer to wash it down. It’s the weekend, and she’s unlucky in love. Gene can allow herself this. “Grandpa, don’t leave the light on when you go.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, and Gene lingers for a second, watching him from the doorway. The slump of his shoulders, his downcast eyes. He’s been different since gramma had passed. Drowning himself in his sleeplessness and his documentaries. 

“Try and get some sleep tonight,” she says. He huffs.

“You too, Genie.”

She leaves him to the darkness, to the fireflies making dim green shapes in the air. Pads through the kitchen, rattles a beer from the fridge door, the light washing the room in its vague glow until she shuts it, and the room falls back into darkness. It’s pure muscle memory that leads Gene back through the dark house, down the narrow corridor to her bedroom, where she cracks open the window and only lights a cigarette when she hears her grandpa come inside. His heavy tread through the house. The clink of the beer bottles into the recycling. She perches on the windowsill, and rolls the flint of her lighter over and over until it sparks. Cosied up with a cigarette in hand and her sketchbook on her knee, the sounds of the night ringing in her ears. A fox has been haunting the empty lot behind the house for a few weeks now. Sometimes, she and it catch eyes through the gloom.

Gene sketches idly in her book for a little while, cigarette burning low between her fingers, pleasantly warm from the beer worming its way through her. Grandpa’s words keep echoing through her. How could she match the gesture of Merriell turning up for her in the middle of a rainstorm? Gene’s never been a grand gestures sort of person. She likes the understated, the intimate. Hell, she doesn’t even really like celebrating her birthday for all the attention it lands on her. 

Her hand moves of its own volition across the page, Gene’s head up in the clouds as she turns various ideas over. Drawing has always been therapeutic for her. She might’ve eventually pursued something a little more scientific, but Gene sometimes wonders if this is her natural state. It gives her time to process things; hands busy but mind busier. She’s always been a little on the edge of too-internal. When she was a kid, her mom used to read her diaries. She can’t imagine the wealth of information that must’ve been in those things. 

A crow hangs in mid-flight on the paper. Grey, vague, lightly sketched at. The inquisitive cock of its head, its bright little eye. And Gene thinks of the warmth of a hot metal picnic table on the backs of her bare thighs. Red pen bleeding through to her laboriously ordered math notes. 

Down the hall, the TV comes on. In Gene’s mind, a plan is unfurling.

————

The charcoal takes a week to arrive. The bird even longer to finish. In the time between, Gene runs a lot. Soaks her feet in the creek, smokes a few illicit cigarettes. Looks at herself in the mirror, tilting her head this way and that and tries to work out if she leans more towards handsome or just plain mannish. Cuts her hair in the bathroom sink. Sketches, draws, smudges, thinks about Merriell. 

The tattoo on her stomach. Her hair, held back by one of the myriad of black hair elastics that hang from her skinny wrists. The mole on her breast. Her bitten-down nails. The overlarge waist of those navy dickies, the hair under her arms. Gene feels she has her mapped in the kind of detail she could label. Merriell, in watercolour, frozen between the pages of an encyclopaedia. 

The side of Gene’s hand is near-constantly black from the charcoal. Every time she looks at the page, the crow seems more alive than before. 

There’s a certain element of avoidance when it comes to creating. The constant tweaking and obsessing over the little parts of it, just to delay the inevitable. The finishing. And everything that comes after that. Maybe the stakes on this are a little different to what fuels most artists, Gene thinks, but still she feels the same wariness and inability to look at the picture and know that it’s done. That she’s done as much to it as she can. Because with looking comes calculating comes picking it apart. But as the weekend melts into the start of another week, Gene knows that she’s reaching the end of her time to make her move. Any longer, and she’s afraid that Merriell will cut her losses. She seems the sort. 

So Gene sprays the picture with her gramma’s old Aqua Net to set the charcoal. Slides it into a stiff, brown paper envelope she’d picked up after work the other day. Scrawls on the front, _For Merriell_ , and stands there looking at it for a second, heart banging in her chest. Uncertainty crawling through her. What if Merriell thinks it juvenile? Or pathetic? Did Merriell have these same fears in the drive over to Gene’s house, the rain lashing down against the windscreen? Somehow, Gene doubts it. 

Instead of giving into her own neuroticism, Gene decides to channel a little of Merriell’s apparent carelessness. Laces up her running shoes and throws a quick goodbye over her shoulder as she leaves the house, envelope under her arm. 

“Have fun!” her grandpa calls, as if he can sense the nerves crawling up out of her throat. Chest tight and caught somewhere between anxiety and anticipation; not conducive for a run, but Gene grits her teeth and bears it. Before long, the rhythmic thud of her feet against the sidewalk soothes her, eases her chest, and Gene gives herself over to the push and pull of her body, the air in her lungs and the sweat on her brow. 

She hasn’t run this route in a while. Down through the middle of Sytwell, through the square, drenched in evening sunlight. Golden hour, and the air is sweet and warm. The envelope awkward under Gene’s arm as she huffs her way across town. Mind forcibly, fixedly blank, except for when a worry manages to sneak through the brainlessness that comes with running, to surprise her. _What could happen?_ the thought whispers, and Gene loses the rest of the route to tripping uneasily through all the worst case scenarios. Finding Merriell at home and unbothered by the few weeks of silence between them. Surprised to see Gene, amused to find her still hung up on her after one date and a few tender little kisses. She’d laugh, Gene knows. She tries to keep it from her mind.

Locust comes up quicker than she remembers it. Either Gene is so in her head that Sytwell is passing unnoticed by her, or her weeks of running on the uneven ground on the trails have made her quicker on asphalt. Either way, it’s a surprising miracle. It means that she doesn’t have time to work herself up to chickening out; before her brain can even really catch up, she’s jogging up the steps to Merriell’s porch, and slipping the envelope through the letterbox.

It’s there, lingering on the doormat, that Gene feels a twinge of regret. Standing there amongst Merriell’s things; the wide-backed wicker armchair, the ashtray full of butts sitting on the ground next to it. A bike, the tire flat. An array of potted plants clustering every other available space. Such a strange glimpse into her life, and one that Gene wants to linger over, wants to puzzle over. But urgent nerves are alight in her stomach again, and Gene is down the steps, through the front yard, and halfway the street before she hears someone calling her name. 

“Gene!” Distant, but loud. Unmistakeable. “Hey, Gene!”

For a second, Gene honestly considers ignoring it. At the sound of Merriell’s voice, her heart had ratcheted up into her throat, a jolt of panic at the prospect of having to face the consequences of her bold little gesture so soon. But, she stills in the street. Chest heaving as she works to catch her breath. Over-aware of the sweat in her hairline and sticking her tank top to her back. 

From behind her, Merriell calls again. “Gene, c’mere!”

She couldn’t have even had time to open the envelope. Gene turns back the way she came, and spots Merriell hanging over the side of her porch, waving her arm in the air. She’s indistinct in the grainy evening light; pale purple, now that the fleeting golden hour has passed. Nothing but black hair, brown skin. Feeling distinctly like she’s walking to the gallows, Gene hangs her head, and walks back in the direction of the house. 

“Merriell,” she calls, by way of greeting. A little embarrassed, faced with Merriell’s grin as Gene nears the house again. “Alright?”

“Fancy seein’ you,” Merriell replies, bent at the waist over the porch railing to watch Gene come up the street. The envelope is in her hands, hanging over the edge in front of her. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Gene mumbles, more to herself than to Merriell, who she’s close enough to now to catch the expression of mischief on her face. She lingers at the edge of the property, that line where grass meets sidewalk, and watches Merriell straighten up, and slide the envelope through her fingertips.

“This is familiar,” she says. Face vague now that the sun has sunk below the trees, reducing Merriell to dark hair, the playful tilt of her head. Yeah, familiar. Gene, the jab of a stitch in her side and Merriell’s mocking voice ringing out through the dusk. She wonders if she’d be standing here if she hadn’t decided to run through town that night, if she hadn’t doubled over to catch her breath outside this particular house. It’s hard to say. Sytwell drags most people together at some point, small as it is.

Merriell is still watching her, something expectant in the line of her body. Belatedly, Gene realises she should’ve replied. She casts around for something, eventually dredging up a weak, “I ain’t so out of breath this time,” that Merriell snorts at. 

“Maybe not,” she allows, bouncing on the balls of her feet. She cocks her head to the side, and what Gene can make out from her expression is coy, and curious. “You comin’ in?” she asks, as if she’d even invited her.

Gene hesitates. Throws a glance down the street, back in the direction that she’d came. The dusky purple light is making huge shadows from the houses that line the street, and the world seems quiet, and still. She turns back, just in time to catch the way that Merriell had been looking at her. Fond, and soft. It’s there in the way she’s slumped forward over the railing, the line of her shoulders easy and relaxed. A shiver of hope goes through Gene. 

“Are you invitin’ me?” she asks, and Merriell laughs, the sound ringing out in the quiet street. Gene watches her turn the envelope idly over in her fingers.

“I’m invitin’ you,” she says. 

The inside of Merriell’s home is pretty close to what Gene had expected from it in a lot of ways, and wildly different in others. It’s big, inside, which has Gene wondering if it was her family’s house that she’d just…stayed in. The front door opens onto a sleeping porch, which opens directly into a cosy, yellow-tiled kitchen. Big windows make it bright even with the light dropping low outside, even with the sills choked with various bottles and pots and growing herbs. Stones in the plant pots, weathered wooden fronts on the cabinets, a myriad of mugs hung from thin metal hooks under each shelf. The whole room feels well loved, and well-worn, and Gene suddenly comes over all shy as Merriell crosses the room to slide a drawer open, as if Gene isn’t even there. 

The windows throw a giant square of dying light onto the butter-yellow lino. Gene stands in it, watching Merriell inch a knife along the seam of the envelope, heart in her throat and eyes on stalks. The naked wood table with the jug of dried baby’s breath. The curious beetle of Merriell’s brow. The scallions growing shoots in jam jars of water on the windowsill. The sound of paper slipping past paper. The potatoes sprouting pale fingers in the rolling basket of veg beside the counter. A soft noise of surprise. Gene gulps.

When Merriell’s eyes raise from the picture to meet Gene’s, they’re warm, dark, and melting. The two of them frozen on opposite sides of the bright, well-lived-in kitchen, separated by a couple feet of buttercup lino and Gene’s own nerves. 

“You drew this?” Merriell asks, abandoning the envelope to the counter by her elbow, eyes dropping back to the paper in her hands. “Gene, this is amazin’.”

Gene huffs, embarrassed, unable to keep the smile from her face despite it. “Just like real art, huh?” 

Merriell’s eyes dart up to meet Gene’s, a smile playing around her mouth. “Just like it,” she murmurs, and Gene’s heart swells pleasantly in her chest.

The room smells like dish soap, like the blooming jasmine on the sill above the sink. It feels surreal to be here. To be standing inside the house that Gene had jogged obsessively past for months. To be in the same space as Merriell, who is still silent, and admiring the drawing, and nowhere near as chilly as she’d been the last time Gene had seen her. _Did I do something wrong?_ Gene almost asks, but bites the question back down. No use. Whatever had happened to make Merriell so distant has obviously passed, judging by the way she settles her hip against the kitchen counter, and glances up at Gene through her hair.

It’s down, today. The front isn’t tied back in that messy topknot like it normally is at the garage. Loose, and pretty, chopped short to her chin and left to curl wild and black around her face. Gene can still remember how it felt to bury her fingers in it. She swallows, ready to speak, but Merriell beats her to it.

“I was afraid I scared you off, last time I saw you.” She snorts, and places the picture gently on top of the envelope on the counter. The crow stares unblinkingly up at the ceiling, caught in that moment of flight. Gene looks quickly to it, and then back to Merriell’s face. “I was rude when you came to the garage,” she adds. “I didn’t mean to be, but thought I’d give you space.”

“I wanted to see you,” Gene blurts. The room is dipping dimmer and dimmer the longer they stand there; the light hazy and indistinct, purple into grey. Merriell is a wraith wrapped up in it, her arms hugging at her own waist. Something about the sight of her makes Gene feel distinctly soft, tender as a bruise that you just can’t stop touching. “I thought you didn’t want to see me,” she adds.

 _You kissed me_ , she thinks. _You saw me lonely, and you kissed me._ What does it mean?

Merriell huffs, and glances down at the floor. Her bare feet, skinny ankles sticking from the cropped leg of her pants. “I wanted to see you too,” she says, but something lurks behind it. Even if Gene couldn’t hear it in Merriell’s voice, she’d see it on her face. Hesitancy, distance. To think, this was the girl who had pursued her with so little subtlety just a little over a month ago. 

They’re still lingering on opposite sides of the kitchen. The square of dying sunlight that Gene had been stood in is now gone. The room is dark, grainy evening light, the crow on the counter suddenly lifelike. Merriell’s hand comes up to nudge her hair back from her face, fingers twitchy like she wishes a cigarette was between them. Gene wants to kiss her. It’s physical, the want. The air feels soupy with it. 

“Then what happened?” Gene asks, softly.

Merriell’s eyes dart away, turning to the window over the sink, the hazy view of the street through the bug screen. “I dunno,” she murmurs, and Gene waits. Watches Merriell fiddle with a ring on her finger, twisting it around and around as her brow wrinkles. “I got the impression you were fixin’ to move away soon,” Merriell says, finally. Eyes still distracted, and faraway, a frown still on her face. Distantly, she adds, “Didn’t wanna get involved if you were.”

Gene makes a noise. “Oh,” she says. And then, “Oh, Merriell, I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

They regard each other across the kitchen. The soft smudge of Merriell’s full mouth, the dip of her eyes as she shifts, slouching against the counter as all the tension seems to melt from her body. She snorts, and then her eyes turn up to the ceiling. “I’m an idiot,” she says, wryly. When her eyes drop from the ceiling, they settle comfortably on Gene, as if to gauge her reaction.

Gene ducks her head, rocks back on her heels. “Yep.” Then she laughs, more from the sheer relief than anything else, and Merriell joins in. 

“Jesus,” Merriell mutters. Rakes a hand through her hair, and shakes her head in the same motion. Her eyes flick to catch Gene’s, something twisting her mouth. That smile that never is. “I’m not normally like this.”

Gene huffs. “Neither am I.”

Dimly, she wants to know how Merriell normally is. Wants to know what’s made her unlike herself this time around. Gene thinks she might already know but it’s nice to hear these things. The two of them hugging their respective sides of the kitchen, nothing between them but faded light, and sunny lino, their own unsureness. Something about it reminds Gene of the morning that Merriell had peered so carefully at Grandpa’s family photos, but reversed. An image flipped. Merriell, amongst the intimate mess of her home. Gene, invited into it. She’s crossing the room before she can even put words to the impulse. 

Merriell kisses her, and it’s nothing like the cursory little kisses they’d swapped that night, all those weeks ago. No, her hands clutch hold in Gene’s hair like she can’t help herself, a small noise escaping Merriell’s mouth as their lips meet. Backed into the vee between two cabinets, nowhere to go but forward, into Gene, who takes the surge of Merriell’s body against her own easily. Hands tangled up in the buttery soft fabric of the old tee she’s wearing, the two of them pressed together in the dusky violet light. The smell of jasmine, of Merriell’s hair, of the sweet night air coming through the cracked window. Merriell’s mouth opening up under Gene’s, the soft exhalation of breath that comes from her as Gene presses her further into the counter and touches her fingers to the bared skin of her waist.

“I haven’t been able to stop thinkin’ about you,” Gene breathes, when they part. They’re pressed so close together that Merriell is no more than a jumble of disparate shapes. Heavy-lidded eyes, the smear of her mouth. The dip of her lashes as she huffs, and urges Gene forward into another kiss. Long, slow, deliberate. Gene goes limp; she’s never been kissed like she’s something to be savoured before. The ache between her legs is impossible to ignore. 

“Neither have I,” Merriell murmurs, so close that Gene can feel her lips move as she speaks. The kitchen is warm; Gene can taste the sweat on Merriell’s upper lip when she catches another kiss, just before Merriell adds, “You had me so distracted I was scared.” 

Such candid vulnerability somehow doesn’t seem out of place with the two of them sharing air like this. It’s nice that Gene doesn’t have to school her expression, knowing that she too is a Picasso-like jumble up close. Instead, she just murmurs, “Then be scared,” and closes her eyes to accept the kiss that Merriell gives her in reply. 

They linger there for a little while, sharing the silence, kissing like teenagers as the kitchen darkens around them. Gene’s hand under Merriell’s shirt, curving against her warm ribcage, thumb against the soft swell of her breast. She can feel the lines of the tattoo if she shifts her hand, raised up in places where the artist had dug a little deep. Part of her wants to strip the t-shirt over Merriell’s head so she can see it, can taste it, but there’s something sweet about this. Running her fingertips over Merriell’s hard nipple under her clothes, smiling against her mouth at the noise that Merriell makes at the touch. Merriell’s hands are still in Gene’s hair, playing in the short strands at the back of her head, and they tighten as Gene makes another pass over her nipple.

“You wanna —?” Merriell breathes. Hips nudging forward into Gene, who is so wrapped up in the softness of Merriell’s mouth against her own that it takes a second for her brain to reconnect. That old image slips through her head; the sweat, the sofa, Merriell’s eyes flashing in the low light. She’s so wet that Gene can feel it when she moves to put space between them, to take Merriell by the chin to try and gauge her real desire for more.

“You want to?” Gene asks. 

A smile is curling Merriell’s mouth, and she shakes her head to free herself from Gene’s grip, curls bouncing sweetly with the motion. There’s something playful in her eyes, something verging on wicked as her smile unfolds, and she leans forward to murmur, “I wanna taste you.” Her hand is still curled against Gene’s nape. Some distant part of her is wondering if they’re doing this all the wrong way around. Though wouldn’t that be fitting for them? Her stomach had swooped in a thrill of arousal at Merriell’s words, and twists again when Merriell drops her hand to squeeze at Gene’s ass. Right at where the curve of her ass meets her thigh, the girl’s palm hot through her thin running shorts, the touch urging her forward, urging Gene against Merriell’s thigh, where she can’t help but grind her aching clit — 

Gene barely takes notice of the rest of the house as Merriell leads her through to the back. A bungalow, just like her own house, though Merriell’s bedroom lies at the top of a steep ladder; an attic conversion, to make room for all those brothers, Gene guesses. The wood is worn smooth under her feet, and together they emerge from the shadowy walled-in staircase into a low-ceilinged attic room, painted with such a startling array of colours that Gene just stands in the doorway and stares. 

“Oh wow,” she says. And then Merriell yanks her oversized t-shirt over her head, and Gene says, “Oh, wow.” 

Turquoise blue paint made textured by the bumpy wallpaper its daubed on over, a backdrop for a mural that Merriell still seems to be working on; thick black lines, and bold colours, bright abstract shapes. Her, in the middle of it all, smiling and topless, near-flat like a boy with a dark tattoo of a curled snake on her sternum. As Gene watches, she touches her fingers to it, eyes dark in the grainy light of the dim room.

“You like it?” she asks.

Gene’s eyes dart; to the open window, the knotted scarf-turned-curtain shifting in the breeze, and back to Merriell. Her bony shoulders, her dark nipples. Gene swallows. “I like it,” she croaks, and Merriell’s grin grows, turns wicked. 

“C’mere then,” she says, and Gene’s hands find the bare skin of Merriell’s back without having to be told twice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> omg do not kill me for cutting this chapter short at this crucial JUNCTURE , it's literally a 12k word section 
> 
> thank u for reading and thank you in advance for not killing me!!


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this goes directly into porn just a WARNING

Merriell’s bed is a couple mattresses stacked up on the floor; a twist of soft sheets and more pillows than any single person needs. They fall together into it, Gene so aware of her once-sweaty running clothes that she pulls her t-shirt off without sparing herself time to second-guess it. Her sports bra follows, urged over her head by a laughing Merriell as they struggle the tight strip of fabric away, and then she’s bare from the waist up just like Merriell. Bare skin on bare skin. Despite the muggy evening heat, Gene is pebbled with goose pimples.

“You’re so fuckin’ gorgeous,” Merriell says, no hint of self consciousness to her as she pulls Gene close to kiss her. Her hands are as busy as her mouth; coming up to cup Gene’s breasts, to run her thumbs over Gene’s nipples, making a pleased noise against Gene’s mouth at the sound she makes at the touch. The touch of her fingers is electric; Gene feels it all the way through her stomach and into her clit. When Merriell grips harder at her, she whines. Merriell’s words are spinning themselves through her mind; _gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeousgorgeousgorgeous_ —

Her shorts find a home on the ground alongside Merriell’s pants, and it’s then that Gene breaks the kiss, props herself up on her elbow so she can take Merriell in. The other girl tips her chin up, grinning, spread out on her back with her arms over her head. Fingertips playing idly with the ends of her curls. Her brown nipples, the dark hair between her legs and at her armpits. Beautiful against the rust-coloured sheets, beautiful in the way that she looks at Gene. “God,” Gene murmurs. _I want to eat you alive,_ she thinks.

Merriell’s grin turns teasing. “Just me.”

Ignoring her, Gene spreads her hand across Merriell’s flat belly, nudging her fingertips up against that coiled little serpent between her breasts. Merriell’s chest rises and falls under Gene’s palm. Slowly, Gene bends, Merriell’s hand sliding home into her hair as she rests her ear to Merriell’s chest. The softness of her breast, the downy hair running from her belly button to her sternum. Under Gene’s ear, Merriell’s heart is thudding. When she shifts to close her mouth around one of those dark nipples, Gene imagines that heartbeat picking up, soaring upwards with the noise that Merriell makes as Gene tests her teeth to her skin.

“Fuck, yeah,” Merriell breathes, fingers gripping harder in Gene’s hair. Sweet, and sensitive. Gene’s so wet she can feel it smearing on her thighs. Her pulse is hammering in her ears. If it wasn’t for Merriell between her teeth and wrapped up all around her, Gene is sure she’d drift off into nothingness with how full her heart feels.

 _Do you feel it too?_ she wants to ask, Merriell arching under her as Gene runs her tongue over that tattoo that had occupied her for so long. Judging by the way Merriell moans, and sighs, hands sliding over Gene’s nape, her shoulders, she feels it. When Gene dips her hand between Merriell’s legs, it’s to find her as wet as Gene herself is; hot and slick and eager, legs falling open, easy. 

“You want it, huh?” Gene murmurs, enjoying the way that Merriell is looking up at her. She hasn’t had sex in so long that she wasn’t sure how this would go, but it feels comfortable, and natural. Maybe Merriell is just a good partner. Maybe Gene isn’t as out of practice as she feels. Maybe it’s a combination of the two, alongside the desire thumping through Gene’s bloodstream as she presses her fingertips to the wet swell of Merriell’s clit, and watches her go limp. Her eyes close, and her mouth opens. Gene leans forward to dip her tongue inside. 

This is different to how Gene had imagined it. Hasn’t their whole flirtation been? Merriell seems a lesson in expectations. She’s sweet when Gene presses her fingers to her pussy, slipping through the wetness welling up under Merriell’s clit. Hands curling around Gene’s face, eyes huge and open in her face, urging her to move with just a glance. When Gene slips inside, Merriell makes a noise in the back of her throat, her hand moving from Gene’s face to the back of her head. Urging Gene back to her tits, to her tattoo, to the boniness of her sternum through her smooth brown skin. Gene would laugh if her mouth wasn’t otherwise occupied, fingers moving inside of Merriell as the girl grips her hair and pants and moans, the heel of Gene’s hand to her clit. 

Gene can smell how wet she is. The air in the low attic room seems thick with it; with musk, with salt. Gene’s so turned on she feels mindless, mouth pressed close to Merriell’s ear as she fucks her and tells her every little thing that’s been on her mind. Merriell seems happy enough to lie there and take it, hand hooked to the back of her knee to spread herself wide for Gene, who sees nothing but wet black hair and the slick-shine of skin when she glances between Merriell’s legs. The evening has fallen; the room is nearly dark. When Merriell cums, she presses the crown of her head back into her nest of pillows, and makes a noise that sounds as though it’s been yanked from the very bottom of her stomach. Wet filling Gene’s palm. Merriell’s whispering, _keep goin’_ even as Gene pulls her fingers out, and she shivers. All over, full-body, hard nipples and an open mouth. 

Gene hooks her fingers inside, over her lips, her tongue, until Merriell closes her teeth around her knuckles. “I wanna eat you out,” Gene murmurs, and watches Merriell’s eyelids dip, her chest heave. 

“Gimme a minute,” she breathes, once Gene takes her fingers from her mouth. “Jesus,” she says, and throws a hand over her eyes. “You made me cum so quick.”

“I’ve been wanting to.” And then, tongue loose with her arousal, “Makin’ you cum is better than gettin’ off myself.”

Merriell’s eyes find Gene’s in the gloom. “Oh, so you’re like that?” 

Gene’s never really considered herself to be much of anything. Right now, she’s reconsidering. Merriell looks good, submissive. Gene leans close to kiss her, and feels herself go all warm at how Merriell cradles her jaw. Gene can’t make fun of Merriell cumming quick. She’s sure if Merriell so much as breathed on her pussy she’d cum. She knows that because she feels halfway there from just being sunk to her knuckles inside of Merriell, from feeling her cum around her fingers. 

Gene presses her thighs together. Merriell, sleepy-eyed and pretty in the low light, laughs. “You want me?” she purrs, hand to Gene’s chest, pressing her away and then back, down into the mattress. The easy switch of roles. Gene wonders if Merriell can feel her heart banging away in her chest, arousal a live wire through her body as Merriell leans to kiss her. “I gotta eat you out first,” she says. Her eyes glint when she pulls away, wild hair, that Mona Lisa smile. “Gotta give back what I got, huh?”

“I won’t cum as quick as you,” Gene warns, more as a promise to herself than anything else. The way Merriell laughs at her is knowing; the way she kisses her way down Gene’s body is tender. Mouth at her breasts, her stomach, the skin of her hip. A kiss to her clit, which has Gene sighing, and opening her legs for more. It’s been a long time. Her hands come to rest in Merriell’s hair, more as an anchor than any way to urge her into any action. Merriell seems content to take her time, her hand curling against the inside of Gene’s thigh, to push her open further. When Gene glances down the length of her body, it’s to find Merriell looking at her pussy. It makes her blush hotly, all the way down her chest. She’s never had sex where her and her partner haven’t gotten right down to it. Something tells her Merriell is the sort of girl to draw it out. It’s there in the way she rests her cheek to the inside of Gene’s thigh, the way she pushes her thumb against Gene’s hole, spreading her, opening her. 

“You’re so wet.”

Gene tips her head back, screwing her eyes closed as Merriell slips inside her. “You turn me on,” she breathes, rocking her hips forward to try and urge Merriell to fill her up properly. She obliges her; one finger becomes two, pressing up against a spot inside her that makes Gene twist in the sheets. 

“Yeah,” Merriell murmurs, sounding dazed as she rocks her fingers up into that spot. Gene gasps, back arching, just as Merriell adds, “C’mon,” and leans forward to press the flat of her tongue to Gene’s pussy. Wetness, heat. Merriell’s chin is dripping when she resurfaces, grinning, fingers pushing into Gene over and over until she’s whimpering, breathless, feeling wrung out and over-sensitive and frustrated from not quite reaching her orgasm, all at once. Her thighs and the covers under her, wet.

“You’re too fun,” Merriell says, her voice heavy and low once Gene pushes her away. Wet face, swollen lips, coming close for a kiss. Gene huffs at the compliment, tastes herself on Merriell’s mouth.

“And you’re singleminded,” she croaks, as Merriell fits herself up against Gene’s side, and slips her hand down Gene’s belly, through the hair at the crux of her legs, to cup her pussy. Warm, solid, territorial. 

“You make a pretty mess.”

Gene blushes hotly, but urges her hips forward against the steadying pressure of Merriell’s hand despite herself. “You’re the first person to say that,” she murmurs, and lets Merriell interrupt her with a kiss. She’s practically glowing with smug pleasure. Gene rakes a hand through Merriell’s choppy curls, feeling fond. “Lotta girls don’t like it.”

“Then you ain’t fuckin’ the right kinda girls,” Merriell murmurs, and something about her words, or the tone of her voice, has arousal lighting up hot in Gene’s nerves again. Merriell had worked her so far past an orgasm with her fingers to Gene’s g-spot that she’d almost forgotten. Now she feels jangly and desperate with need, gripping at Merriell’s hair and rocking her hips forward with a little more purpose. “Oh,” Merriell breathes, and her smile dips into something wicked, fingers curling close to Gene’s hole. “What you want?”

Teeth gritted, Gene says, “You know what I want.”

“Maybe I wanna hear you say it.”

It’s easy to be smug and teasing when you’ve already got your orgasm. Gene feels like she’s been fucked so soundly past her own that she barely even needs it, but she still wants it. Enough to give in to Merriell’s self-satisfied question, to murmur, “I want you to make me cum,” with only the slightest embarrassed wobble to her voice, to signal just how long it’s been. 

Merriell seems to have no such hang-ups. Instead she smiles, shows all her teeth, very big-bad-wolf. Gene wonders what that makes her, just as Merriell presses her fingers back inside, and says, “Touch your clit.”

Gene wonders if Merriell had just guessed at how much she likes being told what to do in certain bedroom situations, or whether it’s just written across her face. She knows her desperation must be. It’s why she does it without asking, hand dropping from Merriell’s hair to circle her own clit, swollen and wet from both her arousal and Merriell’s own dutiful attempts to finger her dry, or so it seemed. She’s never squirt so much in her life — and there’s something to multilayered to the embarrassment that comes with that thought that Gene hides her face in Merriell’s neck. She can hear the noise Merriell makes right there in her ear; something low, and satisfied. Her fingers start to move, and Gene loses herself to the beat of her heart, to Merriell’s voice in her ear, until she finally cums, clit throbbing under her fingers as she gasps and shivers. Merriell works her through it, before drawing her wet fingers up over Gene’s pussy, pressing teasingly to her clit, a huff of laughter when Gene groans and shifts away.

“Good?” she asks, and kisses at Gene’s eyelids. To say this isn’t how Gene had imagined it would go would be an understatement. 

They lie together quietly in the afterglow, until Merriell shifts her hand between her own legs and starts rubbing at her clit. Gene kisses her, gently, and Merriell cums like that. Her mouth open on a silent moan, Gene’s fingers at her nipples, playing with them just rough enough to send her over the edge. 

A few minutes later, smoke is winding up towards the ceiling, catching in the breeze that comes in through the open window, where it disperses. The room is dim, and hot, the two of them lying with their heads close together in the twist of sweaty sheets. Breathing fast, still. Gene’s heart thudding and slowing in her chest as she rolls onto her side to watch Merriell smoke. 

“I could go again,” Merriell says, dreamily. Ashtray on her belly, ankle propped to her knee, cigarette hovering idly by her head. “I could go forever.”

“Me too,” Gene replies. Neither of them make a move. The muggy heat of the attic bedroom has Gene pinned fast to the sheets; all she can do is alternate between watching Merriell, and watching the room. The dark, indistinct shapes of furniture in the gloom. A huge, round mirror catching what little light still lingers, the nebulous shapes of the mural on the walls. Swooping blacks, once-vivid patches of colour drained of their vibrancy by the night. 

Gene’s just wondering if she’s gonna get to see the place in daylight when Merriell asks, “You wanna stay ‘round?”

Gene blinks up at the ceiling. Popcorn-textured, and white. “Yeah,” she says, slowly. A glance at Merriell shows the girl smiling, her eyes closed as she brings her cigarette to her mouth. Her hair wilder than ever, after their rolling around in the sheets. 

“Cool,” Merriell says, and they lapse into silence. As easy as that. Gene lets out a long breath she hadn’t realised she was holding, 

“Are we back to normal?” she asks the ceiling. Merriell snorts.

“Did we have a normal to start with?”

Gene hums, and tips her head to the side to watch Merriell smoke. Just the ends of her cigarette now, glowing close to her knuckles. The room is so quiet that Gene hears the rasp as she takes a drag, and then crushes the ends into the ashtray on her belly. “I guess we didn’t,” Gene says, when Merriell’s eyes settle on her. Dark in the low light. She’s made up of shadows; pretty, indistinct, mysterious. That ghost of a smile playing around her mouth. Gene adds, “But we can make one now,” and watches that smile bloom. 

“Oh yeah?” Merriell settles her hands over her chest, her whole attention now settled on Gene, heavy and warm as a blanket in this heat. “What’d that look like?”

It’s a good question. Gene makes a thoughtful noise, and casts her eyes back to the ceiling. It’s a small pleasure to know that Merriell is still watching her, and Gene finds herself schooling her expression just slightly with that knowledge. She purses her lips. “I dunno. Meetin’ up after work, a few drinks.” She shrugs, fingers knotting together over her belly. “Me comin’ over here, you comin’ over mine —” she hesitates, then makes a face, the image of Merriell and her grandpa in the same room. “Or I’d just come here,” she says, and they laugh.

“Sounds nice,” Merriell says, lightly. She moves to set the ashtray on the bedside table, and when she sinks back into the bed she curls herself up against Gene, who shifts automatically to accommodate her. Arm curled over her shoulders, their fingers finding each other over Gene’s stomach. It’s sweet. Gene wonders if Merriell can feel the way her heart is beating. 

“What’s it look like to you?” Gene asks, and Merriell makes a considering noise.

“I’ll know it when I see it.”

Gene wants to ask, _so is this it? Are we something?_ but can’t make her mouth shape the words. It’ll shatter their cosy peace, if Merriell says the wrong thing. For all Gene knows, this is a weekend fling for Merriell, though something in the way she’d looked at Gene from across the kitchen contradicts that. She thinks of the crow resting on paper downstairs, then wonders after the cardinal from ten years ago, and snorts. Merriell makes a noise against Gene’s throat.

“What’s so funny?”

Gene huffs again, and shrugs. “Nothin’.” She drops her eyes to their hands, their intertwined fingers. “Just thinkin’ again about what I would’ve made of this as a teenager.”

“It’s a weird thought,” Merriell says, and Gene makes a noise of agreement. She can’t even try to imagine what her past self would’ve made of all this, sex aside. The closeness, the softness in Merriell’s eyes when she’d looked at Gene from across that cosy kitchen with the drawing of the crow in her hands. She wonders if this was all set in motion ten years ago, with that innocent gesture of slipping a drawing through the vents of one particular tomboy’s locker. Merriell had scratched her name into the paint with something sharp. Someone had written _IS A DYKE_ underneath in mean black Sharpie. The next time Gene had gone by Merriell’s locker, the Sharpie had been painted over, and so had Merriell’s name. And Gene had wondered if the cardinal was in there, or whether Merriell had found it and taken it home. She supposes she knows the answer, now.

They lapse into silence; Gene watching the shifting lights of car headlights on the ceiling, Merriell quiet and still against Gene’s chest, in her arms. Just the twist of her fingers through Gene’s own to give any sign that she’s even still awake. Distantly, Gene’s aware she can still taste Merriell on the back of her tongue, that the room still smells like their sweat despite the breeze coming in through the open window. It makes her clit ache a little; half turned on. Not really enough to do something about it, but just enough to have Gene shifting, settling deeper into the bed so she can press her face to Merriell’s throat, where she smells the strongest. Gene feels, rather than hears, the pleased noise Merriell makes at their new position. Her fingers comb gently through Gene’s hair, pulling her close to her chest, to the snake on her sternum; black and blurry through the darkness, and with Gene’s closeness. 

“Do you think if we didn’t know each other from back then, I’d still be here?” Gene asks, mouth to Merriell’s skin, to the light hair that runs down her sternum, and darkens at the crux of her legs. When she passes her hand over Merriell’s hip, the girl sighs, and her fingers tighten just so in Gene’s hair. The ache in her clit is heavier now. She loves this; the quick release that comes with your first time with a new person, and the second go around that comes in slower, less desperate, more heated. 

Merriell guides Gene’s mouth to her breasts, and makes a low noise in the back of her throat when Gene catches a nipple between her teeth. “Yes,” she breathes, holding Gene close with a hand to the back of her head. “It’d just be different.”

“Different how?” Gene asks, and mouths at Merriell’s breast. Tasting her sweat, her salt. In a minute they’ll be slick with it again. The night’s heat hasn’t abated a bit, but Gene can’t bring herself to care. Merriell’s fingers tighten in her hair. Gene closes her eyes, and takes Merriell’s nipple back into her mouth.

“Just different,” Merriell manages, her voice low and thick with her sudden arousal. _Two ain’t good enough?_ Gene wants to tease, but her mouth is too busy to make any jabs about Merriell’s seemingly endless stamina. “Like maybe we’d have fucked that night after Dukes’, or maybe I woulda taken you straight home and got you outta those wet clothes.” She huffs, a laugh turning into a moan, as Gene clutches at the swell of her ass. “Fuck, yeah.”

“You wanted to fuck me?” Gene asks, sly. Mouth feeling heavy and swollen from sucking on Merriell’s nipples, hard and wet with Gene’s spit, now. She can barely drag her lips and teeth and tongue away from them, especially with the noises that Merriell is making at having her tits sucked. Gene digs her fingertips into Merriell’s ass cheek, and snorts against her chest at the noise Merriell makes. 

“I wanted you to fuck me,” Merriell breathes, arching her back to press her tits into Gene’s face. Hand still clutching in the sweaty strands of hair at the back of Gene’s head, holding her so close that Gene couldn’t do anything but bite at her if she tried. Merriell curses. Gene can smell her wet again. “I wanted you to fuck me in the car, wanted you to shove your hand down my pants and finger me like a fuckin’ teenager.” Here, she laughs. Gene props her chin to Merriell’s bony sternum to grin up at her. Flashing dark eyes in the dim room. Just the generous smudge of her mouth, the black halo her hair makes, backlit by the window above them both. 

“You wanted it like that?” Gene asks. 

Merriell doesn’t seem to possess any shame, or perhaps she’s just ignoring Gene’s teasing, because she throws her head back to shake her hair out, and says, “Yeah, wanted to cum right there on your fingers.” She laughs when Gene pulls her in closer, the two of them tangled up together on the bed, wet and wanting but ignoring that, for now. Just how Gene likes it. 

“That’s dirty,” she breathes, and Merriell makes a noise that seems torn between a laugh and a moan. Gene clutches harder at the meat of Merriell’s ass, just to hear her moan. “Anyone coulda seen us.”

“Maybe I want that,” Merriell mutters, raking her fingers through Gene’s hair and ducking down for a kiss in the same motion. When they break away, Merriell is grinning. Gene can only tell by the way the light from the street outside catches in her teeth. “The risk is hot, ain’t it?”

 _I wanted you to fuck me over the pool table,_ Gene wants to say, but can’t. Instead, she moves her hand to Merriell’s hip, to her belly, dipping down between her legs to find her wet to her thighs. She makes a satisfied noise. Merriell drops her head to the pillow, and they shift; Merriell to her back, her legs falling open, Gene two fingers deep in her with her mouth once more on her tits. Merriell’s hands in Gene’s hair. A moan, caught right there in the back of her throat. She’s so wet that Gene can give her three fingers easy, so wet that when she brings her fingers up to circle Merriell’s clit, Gene’s fingertips skate right over it. Smearing on her thighs, on Gene’s wrist, on the bedsheets under them. Gene feels like there’s something clawing at the back of her throat, something full of possessive wicked fangs. She wants to swallow Merriell whole. She wants to taste her like nobody else has ever tasted her. She wants to get her own cum on her until she smells just like Gene. She wants, she wants, she wants.

Even stuffed with a few fingers, Merriell can’t stop from running her mouth. Her hair fanning out on the pillow, something languid but tightly wound in her limbs as she clutches at Gene, and bucks her hips into her touch. “I thought about this a lot,” she’s whispering, voice filthy with how ragged and low it is. “Fucked myself stupid thinkin’ ‘bout you inside me, and you over me, all ‘round me.” She huffs, hand dropping from Gene’s hair to rub at her clit, their hands bumping as Gene works her fingers inside of her, and grins.

“Am I livin’ up to your fantasies?” she asks, breathless. Heart thumping in her chest, pussy so wet between her legs that Gene thinks she could sit herself on Merriell’s thigh and rub one out just like that. 

In the dim room, Merriell’s expression is shadowy, dark and melting. The clutch of her free hand into her curls, the way pleasure seems to drag her face down with it. Mouth open, brows downturned as if in pain as Gene crooks her fingers inside her, and makes her squirt. Wet, into the palm of Gene’s hand. She works her until Merriell is twisting and gasping and knocking Gene’s hand away, muttering, “Yeah, yeah, fuck, Genie —” 

Her orgasm seems to take her by surprise. One minute her fingers are circled loosely around Gene’s wrist as if to pull her away, and then the next she’s cumming, pressing her head back into the pillows as she pants and gasps, and tightens up around Gene’s fingers. More wet, the smell of her orgasm, reaching for Gene to kiss her as she comes down from it. 

Gene almost ruins the kiss with how hard she’s smiling. Affection a bright happy bubble in her chest. “Came outta nowhere, huh?” she asks, once Merriell releases her to sink back into the pillows, hand coming to rub idly at her tattoo as her eyes close.

“Ha,” Merriell says, deadpan and breathless. Sweat on her brow catching the light. “Somethin’ like that.”

Gene slips her fingers from Merriell’s pussy, and grins at the noise the girl makes as she presses her slick fingers to her clit. “Yeah?” she asks, and Merriell groans, and rolls her head against the pillow.

“You got an off switch?” Merriell asks, like she isn’t tilting her hips up to meet Gene’s fingers. Like she hadn’t started all this, like she doesn’t know that the second round is the best. Gene can still feel those fangs in the back of her throat. She’s so turned-on she feels shuddery with it; bright-eyed, oversensitized. Hard nipples and an aching clit. She slides her fingers down through Merriell’s wet, over her clit, over her hole. Spreads her, watches her face intently. 

“Wanna see you in daylight,” Gene murmurs, and Merriell huffs, drops her head back against the pillows as it becomes clear that Gene is ignoring her. “Wanna see your pussy, wanna see you ‘round my fingers.”

“Jesus,” Merriell groans, dragging the word out real long. _Jeeeee-sus._ That lazy drawl of hers. That deep voice, made deeper by their fucking. Then, “Gene, lemme get you off.”

She says it with Gene’s mouth at her navel, with Gene’s fingers following her wet down to her ass. The noise Merriell makes when Gene presses against her there is surprised, and throaty, yanked from deep inside her. Gene grins against Merriell’s belly. “Lemme make you cum one more time,” Gene says.

Outside, a car passes, and the illumination its headlights throw only makes the dark that follows blacker. Gene can’t see Merriell’s expression, can’t see anything but the shine of her sweat and the mad curl of her hair as she props herself up on her elbows. Silhouetted against the square of hanging dark blue that is the open window. The smell of honeysuckle on the breeze. “I don’t know if I have another in me,” Merriell mutters, but her voice is low and Gene finds she doesn’t need to see the girl’s expression to read her. Turns out a person can be an easy read, when their orgasm is slicking your way as you tease a thumb against their ass. Who knew? 

“Let’s find out,” Gene breathes, and Merriell slumps like a puppet with cut strings when Gene ducks her head to taste her clit, and tests her thumb against her asshole with a little more pressure. 

_Should’ve known you’d like this,_ Gene wants to say, dozens of half-teasing, dirty thoughts piling up behind her busy tongue. She can’t pick her face up from Merriell’s pussy to speak them, and instead just moans against her wetness, against her soft heat. The sweet hardness of her clit, the easy give of her hole when Gene presses her tongue inside, lapping at all her wet. Tasting her, teasing her. Merriell’s hand making a fist in the short strands of Gene’s hair, as she pants and moans and makes abortive little sounds, fucking her hips against Gene’s face. Gene’s thumb inside her, now. Eased by her cum. Just enough for her to feel it, to understand it as the vague promise it is. _Later_ , Gene wishes she could say, _later, I’ll fuck you right here._

The room is so hot and close that Gene can feel sweat beading up and rolling down from her hairline, between her shoulder blades. Merriell’s thighs up around Gene’s ears as she cums, a hard-won orgasm judging by the noise she makes. Hissing out between her teeth, caught in the back of her throat. She’s shivering by the time she’s done, and Gene kisses her from thigh to throat, and wipes tears from Merriell’s eyes with a murmured, “Was that good for you?” 

“Good,” Merriell manages, sounding wrung out but pleased about it. Gene can’t help the laugh that bubbles up from her chest, and endures the weak smack of the back of Merriell’s hand to her chest as penance. “Shut up.”

“You’re cute likin’ somethin’ in your ass,” Gene counters with, and Merriell snorts. 

“Cute,” she echoes. Her voice is dreamy, faraway. “That’s one word for it.”

“Of many,” Gene agrees, and lets Merriell gather her close into another kiss. Under Gene’s hand, she can feel the race of Merriell’s pulse in her neck. 

Against her mouth, Merriell murmurs, “Let me make you cum.”

For some reason, the words go right to Gene’s clit. It’s the way she’d said it; low, murmured gently into Gene’s mouth. The curl of her tongue to Gene’s, following it. The squeeze of her fingers against Gene’s waist. Suddenly, Gene is made aware once more of her own arousal, her own wetness. Desire a second rushing bloodstream in her veins. She’d been able to ignore it earlier, in favour of Merriell’s pleasure, but now with her fingers tracing over Gene’s stomach, she’s helpless to give herself over to it. 

“You fucked me so good,” Merriell murmurs, as she eases her fingers over Gene’s clit. Gene makes a noise at that, tucking her face close to Merriell’s as the girl sighs, and adds, “Better than I even imagined.”

Gene huffs, glancing down the length of her body to see Merriell’s hand working between her thighs. Those broad, capable hands, her delicate wrists. Gene’s stomach twists, and she breathes, “You imagined it a lot, huh?”

Merriell snorts, nose in Gene’s hair, her voice affectionate and gently teasing as she says, “Ain’t that clear enough by now?” 

The pads of her fingers are just rough enough to be perfect, much-needed friction against Gene’s slick clit. She feels swollen, turned on to near-mindlessness, and tense as a result of it. Like every muscle in her body is yearning towards her release, brought closer maddeningly slowly by the soft, deliberate way Merriell is teasing at Gene’s clit. Like she wants to make it last as long as possible, like she wants Gene a desperate mess by the time she lets her tip over the edge. Gene likes it like this; wonders how Merriell could’ve possibly known, whether she’d realised as soon as she’d looked at her. The thought is hot, and Gene lets out a shaky little moan which Merriell laughs at; playful and teasing now that she’s gotten her own. 

Fingers, spreading her hole. Circling her clit, pinching her nipples. Merriell’s mouth at the shell of her ear, her teeth catching at Gene’s earlobe, as she moans, overwhelmed. The hot dark room, the twisted sheets. Merriell whispering, _you smell so good after a run,_ and, _wanted to kneel down in that office and get my knees all scraped up on the concrete —_

Gene cums with her face in Merriell’s neck, lip caught between her teeth like she’s still in her bedroom at home, getting herself off to whatever dirty Merriell-centric fantasy she could dream up. It’s only when Merriell pushes her fingers into her that Gene moans for real, the sound coming up from inside her, unbidden. 

“Just want to feel you cum,” Merriell breathes into her mouth, and that makes Gene shiver, makes her rock her hips down to draw her orgasm out as long as she can. And Merriell works her through it, kissing at Gene’s face as she grips at the girl’s wild hair and moans and shakes.

They lie together catching their breath, afterwards. Still curled up so close that Gene can barely tell where she ends and Merriell begins. Their sweat, their spit, their cum. When Gene finally finds the energy to shift, and roll away, the breeze that finds her is cool and welcoming, full of the smells of a summer night. Merriell lights a cigarette. They pass it back and forth through the darkness, laughing softly at the fumbling of their fingers, made clumsy by their exhaustion. The sound of voices in the street. Merriell, throwing herself across the mattress to grab for the ashtray. The two of them settling comfortably together, like they’ve been doing this for years.

It’s novel, not to second-guess everything. Gene is trying hard not to give into the urge to.

The vague light from outside catches in Merriell’s earrings, as she rolls her head to the side to look at Gene. Her eyes huge and dark, sweetly curious. “What’re you thinkin’ about?” she asks, and exhales smoke towards the ceiling. 

Gene grins at her, happy to say, “Nothin’, literally nothin’.”

Merriell laughs, and the cigarette changes hands. “That’s a good feelin’,” she says, and Gene hums in agreement. 

“What about you?” Gene asks, after a beat, and tips her head to the side to try and gauge Merriell’s expression. It’s hard to, between the darkness and the girl’s own impassivity. Gene yearns absently for the same understanding that had surfaced earlier, with her face between Merriell’s legs.

“I don’t like to think too much,” Merriell says, and her teeth flash in the dark room. “Ruins everythin’.”

“I envy that,” Gene says. Smoke streams up to the ceiling. “Wish I could shut my brain off for good, sometimes.”

“Well, I gotta work at it,” Merriell replies, her voice thoughtful. An edge of something to her tone that has Gene wondering if she’s joking around. “Did a lotta thinkin’ these past few weeks.” She nudges her elbow to Gene’s, familiar and affectionate. “You’ve got a way of gettin’ into my head.”

Gene laughs, and passes the cigarette back; watches the cherry flare as Merriell takes a drag from it. A sweet orange glow in the blue darkness. “I could say the same for you,” she says, and they exchange a warm, sidelong glance that makes Gene want to melt into the mattress. Their sex has already gotten her started; this comfortable, intimate pillow talk is finishing her off. Like Merriell’s bed is the most comfortable place in the world. Like all her bones have been turned to soft taffy. She hasn’t felt like this with someone for a long time. 

Merriell gets up to go wash her face and brush her teeth once the cigarette has been extinguished, and Gene shoots her grandpa a quick text while she waits for her to come back upstairs. He doesn’t reply; only reads it, but her settles her somewhat to know he won’t be fretting after her coming home. She isn’t ready for the third degree she knows he’ll treat her to tomorrow, but drives it from her mind when Merriell returns, hair damp around her face and mouth minty when she comes to kiss Gene again.

“I gotta get a frame for your drawin’,” she says, idly, as Gene settles against her chest. Merriell gestures to the wall, fingers splayed. “Gonna hang it right there, gonna dig that drawin’ you posted into my locker out too.”

Gene huffs, and buries her face down into Merriell’s armpit to ask, “You really still have that?” Embarrassment colouring her voice. It’s been a vulnerable day. 

“Why’d I lie about that?” Merriell sounds drowsy. Gene shrugs.

“I dunno.” 

They fall into silence. Merriell’s fingers tracing idly at the bare skin of Gene’s shoulder, her breathing slowing. Sleep is weighing Gene down, making her body feel heavy and warm and languid, her head still pleasantly loose and cottony from their sex, and from the relief of knowing that the weeks of uncertain silence are over. Such a tiny miscommunication. If Merriell didn’t sound halfway to sleep herself, Gene would be asking her, _did you really think I’m in any place to leave Sytwell?_ It’s a curious thought. Gene feels caught in this glue trap of a town, and halfway out the door at the same time. Eyes fixed ahead on something else, body mired down in the present. 

Gene’s always been the sort to live for the future. She thinks Merriell must have both feet so solidly down in the present that she can’t move an inch, for fear of uprooting it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for reading!! also i'm really happy to say that this fic is now FINISHED :~~) so expect the next couple chapters to be nice and long and hopefully less awkwardly separated up!!


	9. Chapter 9

In the morning, they have sex again, and Merriell drags Gene down the stairs and into the shower afterwards to scrub them both clean. Gene, eyes screwed shut against the shampoo suds inching her way down her face, can’t stop smiling. Merriell’s fingers are in her hair, nails scratching at her scalp and she talks loudly over the rush of the water. _I bet it takes you no time to get out the door in the morning, huh?_ Tipping Gene’s head gently back into the flow of water to rinse her hair. _Man, I’ve wanted to shave my head for years…_

Once Gene is scrubbed and rinsed and pawed all over, they swap, and Gene washes Merriell’s thick hair for her; rinsing it over and over until her curls are dark and clean. Then she kisses her, and Merriell sways into her front, making a pleased noise against Gene’s lips. They both smell like the same shampoo now, the same soap. Gene can smell it on her skin when they flop back into bed, Merriell sitting crosslegged as she lights herself a cigarette. 

Quite settles over the room. Gene lays back and traces the dips and valleys of the mural daubed onto the wall by her head, fingertips running lightly over the bumpy wallpaper. Her mind is blissfully blank, wrapped up in Merriell’s soap, in sunlight.

“You eat breakfast?” Merriell asks, into the silence. Her hair is wet, making dark spots on the old grey t-shirt she’s thrown on over her head. As Gene watches, she tilts her head to blow a stream of smoke towards the open window, pretty and birdlike in the warm morning light.

“I eat breakfast,” Gene answers, sleepily. She probes at her sternum with her fingertips, caught up in how Merriell looks in the hazy sunlight. Her eyelids feel heavy, like she could slip back into a doze at any second, but she’s enjoying watching Merriell too much to let them close. Her hair is darker now that it’s wet, and longer. Just flirting with her shoulders. 

Gene’s gramma had gotten her into birdwatching. It was the thing they had that was just theirs; not Gene-and-Ed, not Gene-Ed-Grandpa-Gramma. Just Gene, and her gramma, and cool mornings spent together in a hide tucked away down on the trails. Gramma would pack sandwiches, and tea, and together they would take turns peering through the same pair of binoculars. Later, Gene would go home and pour through her gramma’s old illustrated bird encyclopaedias, gazing at the pretty watercolours and picking out which ones they’d spotted that morning, or which ones she wanted to see next time. Her preoccupation never really waned; Gene still loves to sit at the kitchen window and sketch the birds hopping around the feeders that her gramma had hung outside, twenty years ago. 

Something about looking at Merriell stirs up the same feelings in Gene. That same fascination. Like she wants to track every expression that slips across her face, every movement of her body. Her broad-knuckled hands, the bony jut of her shoulders. There’s a quality to Merriell that would be awkward, if she didn’t carry herself so well. Like she’s all made up inside of wires just barely linking her together. Skinny arms with those big hands stuck on the end. Slim-hipped, and small, but wiry. Her huge, roving eyes. The sulky pout of her mouth. The sharp feline grace of her face. 

Then Merriell shifts, and the sun catches in her eyes, and in the cigarette smoke curling around her head. Turns her eyes to glass, turns the smoke to a veil. Gene’s hands twitch against her chest, longing making her feel wound up taut as a band about to snap. 

“I’m thinkin’ eggs,” Merriell says, and pillows her chin on her palm as she gazes out the window. “Maybe bacon, but I think it’s all gone bad.”

Gene smiles to herself, and finds her voice again to murmur, “Eggs sound perfect.”

Merriell glances at her, and a smile blooms on her face too. “What’s so funny?” she asks, because Gene can’t hold her amused grin back now. 

“Nothin’,” she insists, and heaves herself up from her slump against the pillows to lean close, and pluck the cigarette from Merriell’s unresisting fingers. “Just lookin’ at you.”

Merriell’s smile grows, and turns teasing. “What, you think I’m funny-lookin’?” 

“Somethin’ like that,” Gene mutters, taking a drag from the smoke before handing it back. “So you said somethin’ ‘bout breakfast?” 

Merriell scoffs, and shakes her head, but her eyes are bright and happy as they flick over Gene’s face. “Eggs?” she asks, and Gene leans in close to kiss her, affection bright and warm in her chest. 

The bacon had gone bad, and finds its way into the trash as Merriell whistles her way through breakfast. The eggs sizzling and spitting in the pan, the radio crackling its way through the oldies station as Gene fiddles with Merriell’s ancient coffee machine. The yellow kitchen is even brighter in daylight, the plants lush and green, sunlight glancing off all the little jars and pots and mugs that clutter the space. And Merriell, right at home in the cosy chaos of it. Wearing a pair of old blue Wranglers lopped into shorts, a t-shirt with the vinyl logo cracked and peeling beyond recognition. Grease from the pan spitting onto her bare arms to make her yelp, her wet hair drying black and fluffy around her face. 

Gene’s wearing a t-shirt and a pair of underwear that Merriell had loaned her, to keep her from having to climb into yesterday’s sweaty running clothes. Merriell’s smaller than her; the tee is tight across her chest when Gene reaches to grab a mug from its hook, and tight under her armpits, high on her waist. Still, it smells like her, so Gene is already making plans towards stealing it somehow. Smells like her detergent, like her soap. Butter-soft and well-loved, tiny holes dotted along the seams, the collar fraying from use. Gene plucks at it.

“You ever throw clothes out?” she asks, glancing pointedly at Merriell’s own outfit for the day when she turns to throw Gene a puzzled look.

“What, is there somethin’ wrong with my clothes?” she asks, and Gene is just about to backtrack and apologise when Merriell’s mouth twitches. Her eyes bright and wicked in the sunny room. Gene shoves her, and Merriell elbows her back. “No, I don’t throw clothes out,” she says, turning back to the eggs as she levers a spatula under one of them. “Clothes’ve got more wear than people think. I haven’t bought a piece of clothing in like, ten years.” 

“Ten years?” Gene asks, disbelief thick in her voice. Merriell shrugs.

“Just haven’t needed to.” Then she gestures with the spatula towards the bread bin. “Put some toast on, will you?”

Gene puts some toast on. Merriell slides the eggs from the pan onto a couple of mismatched plates pulled from the hutch over her head, and slides the plates onto the table. Butter, coffee, jam. No milk, no sugar; Gene wrinkles her nose at her first sip of her black coffee, and Merriell laughs at her. The table is so small that their knees and feet bump under it, that everything on the surface of it jumbles together and overlaps. Merriell’s elbow almost takes out Gene’s coffee. The toast is stacked precariously on top of the jar of jam. Gene is so happy that it feels like a bright bubble in her chest, something warm and burning and shifting inside her. 

“So be honest,” Merriell is saying, eyes on the slice of toast she’s thickly buttering. “When you came here last night, did you expect me to invite you in?”

“ _No_ ,” Gene says, emphatically. “No way, the plan was to post the drawin’ and get the hell outta there.” 

Merriell makes an amused sound, tearing the crusts from her toast with her fingers. “And then what?”

“I dunno.” Gene shrugs, spearing the middle of her fried egg with the corner of her toast. Bright yellow yolk begins to spread across the white. “Sit at home thinkin’ ‘bout it all night, worryin’. Checkin’ my phone.” She lifts her gaze to find Merriell looking at her, that almost-smile playing around her mouth. “What ‘bout you? What would you’ve done?” 

“I wouldn’t’ve text you,” Merriell says, popping her thumb in her mouth to lick the butter off. “That’s for sure.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she says, tossing her hair back from her face as she goes for another slice of toast. “I woulda driven over to yours and embarrassed you in front of your grandpa for making me waste gas.” Here, she smiles, and Gene snorts. 

“That’s lovely.”

The sun catches in Merriell’s teeth as she grins wolfishly across the little table. “It woulda ended the same way no matter how we did it.”

Gene hums, taking a sip of her bitter black coffee, nose wrinkling. “You think?”

“Sure, once I got the memo that it was me bein’ a dumbass.”

Softly, Gene says, “Protectin’ your own feelings doesn’t make you a dumbass.”

A beat of quiet settles over the kitchen, broken only by Merriell’s chewing. After a moment, she shrugs, and hums, plucking her coffee mug from the clutter of plates on the table. “Still, it don’t matter.” She raises her eyebrows at Gene behind it as she takes a sip. “Does it? We’re here now.”

Gene hesitates, but then relents. The day is too bright, the sunlight too pretty, to waste time going back and forth on things that aren’t ever gonna happen. Different versions of events that have already passed. Instead, Gene just says, “Sure, you’re right,” and smiles when Merriell bumps her bare foot to her ankle.

Over the rest of their breakfast, Gene asks Merriell after the house, which seems to prompt her into a slightly grudging run down of what the past few years have looked like for her. Gene props her chin on her palm and hangs off every word, all her itchy little curiosities about Merriell getting scratched at once. Her three brothers, all swallowed up by marriage, the city, and the military, respectively. According to Merriell, they don’t see each other much. Apparently the last time the whole family was together for their mom’s funeral. Apparently, she was sick. Merriell keeps her voice nonchalant and her eyes on the tabletop for that part, tracing the wood grain on the surface with her bitten-short fingernails. 

“Had to drop out to look after her,” she murmurs, quietly. Gene shifts her mug of coffee between her hands, sliding it across the table top. “It was just me and her.” 

Gene touches her knuckles to Merriell’s, both their hands warming around their half-drunk cups of coffee. She can’t think of the right thing to say, but Merriell seems the sort to prefer silence anyway, so Gene doesn’t force it. After a second, Merriell snorts, and knocks her knuckles back against Gene’s in silent acknowledgment. 

“C’mon,” she says, and scrapes back her chair as she stands. “Dishes.” 

The rest of the morning slides by quietly. Gene does the dishes while Merriell dries them, a cigarette stuck between her lips and wobbling as she talks. She tells Gene about how she came to work for Murray, and rhapsodises a little more on Sytwell’s charms until Gene plucks the cigarette from her mouth, and kisses her. The dishes don’t get finished; instead Gene leaves Merriell’s house with her hair sticking up in wild spikes from a roll around in bed with damp hair, wearing her stolen t-shirt, her borrowed underwear. 

Sytwell is sleepy and slow to rise on hot weekends, and this day is no different. Gene can feel the sunlight on her bare arms, her bare neck, beating down boiling to the top of her head. It feels fitting, after the whirlwind that she’s been caught up in. She concentrates on the scuff of her sneakers against the sidewalk, on the birds calling out, wheeling through the blue sky overhead. On the smell of hot earth in her nose, Merriell’s soap on her skin. Gene smiles to herself. She’s happy. It’s the first time in a long time that she can say that with no hesitation. 

Part of her wants to ruminate on the night, on Merriell’s reasons for giving her the cold shoulder; to pull it apart to read its innards, to hold it up to the light and test its truth. But she holds back. The sun is hot and bright, and the birds are singing. For once, Gene’s decision to return to Sytwell is not something that is filling her with retrospective disappointment. She intends to make that last for as long as possible. 

Grandpa is nowhere to be seen when Gene comes home, kicking off her running shoes on the mat as she calls, “Hello!” out through the house. Silence greets her, which can only mean one of two things; he’s taken himself off to get the morning paper, or he’s catastrophically injured. Gene can guess at which one it is, but still ducks her head into all the rooms in the house, just in case.

While she’s waiting for him to come home, Gene does the dishes left in the sink. She strips her bed, lays new sheets down. She tidies up her grandpa’s table in the living room; pill bottles, his wristwatch, pocket change, an empty glass with whiskey sticky at the bottom. All the million little chores she’s been putting off for God-knows-how-long, as content as she was to settle into wallowing. But not today. The sun shining, the birds singing. The memory of Merriell full up with sunlight, smiling across the table at her.

Gene is dragging the lawnmower across the front lawn when her grandpa walks up, a grin on his face as he stands on the sidewalk to watch Gene in over-exaggerated amazement. Newspaper under his arm, hand over his brow to shield his eyes from the sun. The picture of surprise.

“Never thought I’d see the day!” he calls over the noise of the motor. Gene rolls her eyes at him.

Later, when she comes back in, sweaty and with grass-stained sneakers, he hands her a fridge-chilled beer. She takes it gratefully, even as she grumbles, “You gotta cut the weekend beers out, Gramps.”

The look he throws her is sorrowful. “Genie, you’re gonna take every little pleasure I have left.”

She rolls her eyes, but lets it drop. Her good mood is bulletproof today. For once, her Grandpa isn’t teasing her for it. 

Gene drinks the beer, then drags the lawnmower around to the back, and mows the grass there too. When she’s done she’s dripping with sweat; lays herself out flat on the sun-warmed deck listening to the creak of her grandpa in the rocking chair. Glass of water to her side, the ice melting and shifting inside. She watches the beads of condensation creep down the outside, and worries, briefly, if she’ll hear from Merriell again.

The light turns blue, and cool. Gene drags herself up, makes sandwiches for dinner, and together they eat them on the deck, watching bats flitting between the trees through the twilight. When Gene goes to bed a little while later, she’s worrying again. It’s her natural state. Her mom is a neurotic too, from a long line of neurotics, generations of Sledges worrying themselves into corners over things best left alone. 

But when she comes to her phone, abandoned to her bedsheets earlier in the day, it’s to a text that she almost doesn’t read. Nobody texts her, save her mom sending her the nightly ‘get your life together!’ text; but then Gene looks closer, and the anxiety clinging to her dissipates just like that. 

_MERRIELL: dukes tomorrow? eat dinner this time_

————

The weeks run smoothly and happily into each other following Merriell and Gene’s night together. Summer deepens, thickens, and evenings become hazy and golden and full of flitting little bugs. Gene still takes her runs through the centre of town, still imagines the place static and ruined and taken over by nature, only she doesn’t feel as caught in it these days. Insect in amber no more. She’s free, flapping her wings, starting to see the parts of Sytwell that Merriell loves so much. The sleepy streets, the empty trails. Slow Sunday mornings and dates with Merriell after work. 

They bounce between Dukes’ on weekends, and a diner that Merriell loves during the week. Everywhere they go, people seem to know Merriell; she seems as much of a fixture in Sytwell as Murrays is; as the town hall, the dried-up fountain, the quiet, green forest. Gene likes to sit and watch her in those moments, when Merriell’s trading a few jabs with some guy she knows. She likes to watch her face, her smile, the way her eyes always flick back to Gene; drawn like a fish on a hook. To watch her become less of a mystery, and more of a full picture in Gene’s eyes.

That’s always the best part of dating, right? When the other person finally solidifies in front of you.

If Gene isn’t in work, she’s with Merriell. Joined at the hip, as her grandpa keeps saying, something amused and bright in his eye as he says it. Gene waves him off each time, but it’s true. Sometimes Merriell drops by while Gene is working, and hangs around the front desk asking asinine questions and trying to get Gene into trouble. Always a wicked tilt to her smile while she’s at it, elbows to the desk as she leans in close to look at Gene’s monitor and ask, “ _Moby Dick_ was a movie first, right?”

Afterwards, they go for a food, and sit on the same side of the booth like lovesick teenagers. It’s a tacky fifties style diner; pink strip neon, and bored middle-aged waitresses in little pink uniforms. The food is fried and greasy, the milkshakes so thick you can barely get them up through the straw. Squeaky, pitted Formica, and the pervasive smell of grilling food. It’s very Merriell. She orders the same thing every single time, and seems to live off it like a snake would a good mouse. 

“I don’t cook,” she explains, one evening that they spend cosied up over some onion rings. If Gene’s grandpa knew the food she ate out of the house, he’d die from jealousy. 

“You cooked eggs that first mornin’ I stayed ‘round,” Gene reminds her, tracing her fingers down the condensation that beads the metal malt cup. Merriell has her arm thrown across the back of the booth, the hand that isn’t occupied with her food toying idly with the t-shirt seam at Gene’s shoulder. At Gene’s words, Merriell laughs, and squeezes the side of her arm.

“But were they good?”

Gene hums, and glances at Merriell to see her smiling. “Well,” she says, and Merriell’s smile grows. “I was hungry.”

She laughs her big brash laugh, and squeezes Gene tighter. The next time Gene winds up sleeping over at Merriell’s house, she finds a cookbook in the kitchen, brand new with the sticker still on the back. They spend the evening making dinner from it, and at one point Gene takes a moment to step back, and take it all in. The cosy kitchen, the steam rising from the pan of boiling pasta, the twin glasses of wine and her crow drawing hanging by the window. Merriell, barefoot and whistling along to the radio, poking at the pot of sauce as she lifts a cigarette to her mouth. Gene’s heart swells, and keeps growing; all the way through dinner, through finishing the bottle of wine, to falling into bed with Merriell. She knows the other girl must see it. Gene feels like it’s pushing right out of her, like her skin must be hot to the touch, feverish with affection.

Merriell’s mouth on her breasts, her eyes dark in the darker room. “Are you okay?”

Gene huffs, and curves her hands at Merriell’s jaw, presses her thumb to the generous sweep of her top lip. “I’m happy,” she says, and laughs. Merriell’s mouth curves under her touch. “Ain’t that funny?”

“It’s good,” Merriell murmurs, and pulls Gene down to kiss her.

Most days that they hang out aren’t quite so full of little epiphanies. They paint the decking on the porch one sweltering weekend; Merriell shining all over with sweat, her curls a wild frizz around her face. Gene’s grandpa keeps bringing them water, lemonade, until Merriell asks, “Mister Sledge, you got any beer?” and he beams at her. 

She wears her dirty work clothes, the ones that Gene finds her so attractive in. After they’re done painting and sweating — and in Gene’s case, going pink from the sun — she drags Merriell into the shower, under the pretence of scrubbing the stubborn wood paint from their skin. She has to slap a hand over Merriell’s mouth to keep her quiet as she fingers her, the water beating down cool on their skin, the tiles perfect and cold against Gene’s sunburn. 

Merriell bites her when she cums. A perfect indent of her teeth made in the meat of Gene’s palm. Gene curls her fingers around it for the rest of the day, all the way through dinner with Merriell and her grandpa, all the way through walking her home. Tracing her fingertips over the soon-to-be-bruise until she can’t feel it anymore, and aches for another.

She and Merriell exist in that cosy kind of near-perfection for a while. Sunny days, and warm nights; fireflies, crickets, sharing the same bed. Work becomes less dull, the days don’t seem to drag as badly. Merriell even comes on runs with Gene occasionally, though she’s not very fit and they generally end up walking or dipping their toes in the stream after a mile. It’s an easy peace; one that Gene doesn’t dare ruminate on too hard for fear of shattering it. She feels on the edge of some self-made precipice, made up unfounded worries, and fragile underfoot. 

She can tell there’s something that preoccupies Merriell too. Not in the same way, but in a way familiar enough for Gene to see, even if Merriell doesn’t make it easy to. When Gene finally meets her friends; Burgie, Jay, and Bill, Merriell shows her off as, “the only person to escape Sytwell and still come back!” They all laugh, Gene included, though she tucks it away for later. 

They’re lounging on Merriell’s porch when the topic resurfaces; Merriell to that wicker armchair, Gene to the warm boards of the deck. Cigarette smoke curling into the dusky air, moths throwing themselves against the light above the door.

“D’you miss Mobile?” Merriell asks, out of the blue. Gene glances at her, tearing her eyes from the sketch she was idly making in her notebook. 

“Mobile?” she asks, surprised. “Not so much. I miss Tuscaloosa, where I went to college.”

Merriell hums, and Gene watches the tip of her cigarette flare. She’s melted all over that wicker chair, very much as she had been the very first time Gene had seen her. It conjures memories of the sharp stitch in her side, and the distant, androgynous stranger talking at her from the porch. She almost says something, just to make a joke of all the coincidences that have brought them together, but Merriell says, “Enough to go back?” and Gene senses that the conversation has turned.

“Maybe,” she says, honestly, and Merriell’s eyes flick down to meet her own. That distant, desultory expression Gene recognises well. “Right now I just think about it and wonder if I was ever really there.” She shrugs, and turns back to the notepad on her knee, Merriell’s lightly sketched likeness on the paper. “It feels very far away.”

When Gene thinks back to that time in her life, it’s almost as if she’s looking at it from behind a hazy screen. The people she knew, the places she went. All her old haunts. It’s strange to think it’s all still standing; and not only standing but moving. The city living and breathing and going about its normal rhythm, without her. The secondhand bookstore she used to spend hours browsing in, still opening, and closing, selling books to people who aren’t her. All the familiar streets and alleys, the bar she used to go drinking in on weekends with friends. Even her apartment, all twenty-something bare square feet of it, occupied now by another. Have they found the the stain on the kitchen counter, from overzealous bleaching? Do they also cut their hair over the sink? 

Then Merriell says, “I guess it’s hard to leave a place,” and yanks Gene out of her navel-gazing. A glance over her shoulder at Merriell shows her staring up at the roof of the porch, thumb tapping idly at the filter of her cigarette.

Gene turns away, blinks down at the notepad, at the pencil marks she’d made while her mind was so far away. “Yeah,” she says, slowly. And then, “You’ve never left Sytwell ever?” 

From behind her, Merriell makes a negative noise. “Mom died and then Dad died, and that brings us up to current day.” She laughs, humourlessly. Gene pillows her cheek to her shoulder, to watch Merriell. The dip of her big, expressive eyes, the twist of her mouth. “No time,” she adds, her voice more sober. 

“But you like it here,” Gene prompts, and Merriell’s eyes flick towards her. As their eyes meet, Merriell’s expression shifts; becomes guarded, and then flippant. 

“Love it here,” she says, robustly. “You know that.”

Their conversation that very first time at Dukes’; Merriell’s disarming honesty that had charmed Gene so much. “Do you remember you told me you’d convince me of Sytwell’s charm?” she asks, and Merriell hums. Her posture relaxes.

“Sure.” She taps her cigarette over the ashtray beside her, eyes dark and unerring in the low light. Her mouth twitches. “What, have you come ‘round to it?” 

Gene huffs, and settles back against the porch railing, adjusts the notepad in her lap. “I dunno,” she says, and touches her foot to Merriell’s bare calf. Quick as a snake, Merriell’s hand reaches out to grab it, a smirk on her face as her fingers tighten around Gene’s ankle. “Merriell!” Gene cries, laughing, “Quit it!”

“Only when you say Sytwell’s the best place you’ve ever lived,” Merriell counters with, cigarette wobbling in her mouth as she slides the thumb of her other hand over the arch of Gene’s foot, making her jerk, and laugh. 

“Stop,” she manages, breathless, the notepad spilled from her lap, pages catching the very slight breeze on the air. “This is coercion.” 

They don’t get much further with the line of thought; Merriell drops ash onto Gene’s bare foot, and burns her, and has to make it up to her with the rest of the night spent with her face between Gene’s legs. With the topic dropped, and her mind pleasantly and throughly wiped after sex, Gene doesn’t think about it again. In the morning she cooks breakfast, smokes with Merriell on the porch, admires the way the sun rises over the distant forest, and doesn’t consider at all the possibility of Sytwell having charmed her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> one more chapter to go after this!! thanks so much for reading :~) 
> 
> i recently made a playlist inspired by this fic! you can listen [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7vQk1kbVUzVIJVEN5vcAtD?si=LcKvea5xQquyUCAB1uZ64Q)


	10. Chapter 10

Eight months ago, when Gene was still living out of cardboard boxes and fielding her grandpa’s nagging to get them unpacked, she would spend hours online looking at jobs. Waitressing, bartending, retail, _anything_. It was a complete avoidance tactic; a time in which she could sit there and pretend there was ever hope of her life not being put on pause. Of course, none of them were based in Sytwell.

It absorbed her completely. Her eyes were left feeling fuzzy and staticky from staring at screens. The _ping!_ of her email was the only notification she kept turned on; the noise would rouse her from sleep, would halt her on her runs, would send her stepping out of the shower to pick up her phone with soapy hands. 

None of the jobs she had applied to ever wrote back to her. That is, until now. 

Early morning, and Gene is idly checking her email as she waits for Merriell to come by. They’ve started running together in earnest, as Merriell gets surprisingly stubborn about certain things, and her inability to run a mile is pissing her off. She’s late, which happens so often that Gene has started accounting for it. Her sit on the porch with a cup of coffee is just as much a part of their routine as the run itself.

Yawning, Gene refreshes the app. It’s a cool morning, and a little breezy; perfect for a slow jog through the trails. It stirs Gene’s hair, which reminds her that she needs to cut it, which reminds her that —

Gene stares down at her phone, thumb hovering over the screen.

Back at the start of everything, back during that strange month full of job applications, Gene had sent her resume along to a couple big jobs too. Not waitressing, not bussing plates. The kinds of jobs with salaries. The kinds of jobs in which her degrees would no longer be going to waste. And now, more than half a year later, one has finally gotten back to her. 

Based in Birmingham. Fixed term, a teaching job. _Your application has been successful…_ Gene stops reading. Her mouth is dry.

The first person she thinks of is Merriell. And then, hot on that thought’s heels, her grandpa. Her phone is locked, gripped tight in her suddenly-clammy fist. The only thought running through her mind is, _who do I tell first?_

Trapped between elation and nerves, Gene almost texts Merriell to cancel on their run. She doesn’t want to tell her about the interview yet, and doesn’t feel sure that she’d be able to keep the news off her face. She can feel it there, in the wideness around her eyes, the stiffness of her mouth. But something keeps her from writing the text. Whether it’s hesitation to open her phone and see that email again, or something else, Gene doesn’t know. Either way, she spends the next ten minutes trying to school her expression into something neutral before Merriell arrives.

Merriell still frowns at her when she wanders up, wearing a tiny pair of yellow running shorts, her hair pulled back from her face. “What’s up?” she asks, taking a drag from a cigarette that clashes terribly with her running outfit. “You okay?”

Unconvincingly, Gene says, “I’m fine.” And then, before Merriell can contest it, she stands, tosses her phone to the bench she was sat on. “C’mon,” she says, joining Merriell on the sidewalk. “Before it gets hot.”

Despite the frown still lingering on her face, Merriell says nothing more, which Gene is grateful for. They go for their run, they cool their feet in the water, and they part ways at the bottom of Gene’s street an hour later. 

Merriell is visibly hesitant, rocking back on the heels of her sneakers as she glances off down the road, and then back to Gene’s face. “You don’t wanna come over?” she asks, unsureness tinging the offhand way she says it. “I’m paintin’ a little this afternoon.”

Merriell’s mural. She and Gene have been chipping away at it together recently. It makes it hard to sleep there, because of the paint fumes; Merriell has been sleeping over in Gene’s room a lot lately. Grudgingly, Gene shakes her head, and lies unhappily through her teeth. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs, and swings her hand forward to catch Merriell’s. “I told my mom I’d call her, and Grandpa wants to cook dinner with me tonight.”

Merriell rolls her eyes, but squeezes Gene’s hand companionably. “Fine,” she mutters, pulling her hand from Gene’s as she takes a step backwards. “But we told Burg we’d go for a drink with him tomorrow, remember?”

“I remember,” Gene reassures her, and lingers on the corner watching Merriell until she disappears from sight. 

The trees sway in that fresh, rare breeze; the sun like a ripe fruit rising behind them. The light it throws through the leaves dapples the sidewalk, and Gene’s sneakers, her bare legs. Little random fragments of warm late morning light. And Gene, washed over in it, thinks briefly of Sytwell’s elusive charm. 

————

Gene tells her grandpa over dinner a few days later, and sits through his congratulations with vague guilt forming a dark cloud over her head. 

“Just fantastic, Genie,” he keeps saying, and Gene rests her chin on her palm and watches him, wonders at what he’d do if she pulled up stakes for Birmingham. Wonders if he feels betrayed. Wonders at just how lonely he’d be, with his empty bedroom and his DVDs, making dinners for one once more. 

“I dunno if I’m gonna go for the interview,” she admits, just to see his reaction. Her food is growing cold in front of her; Gene has been pushing it around her plate for the entirety of their mealtime. Her appetite had disappeared not long after that email found its way into her inbox. 

“You should,” he tells her, without looking up from his food. Gene watches the overhead light slide along in the metal frame of his glasses, as he glances at her. “You’ve been waitin’ on an opportunity to get out and use your learnin’, so you gotta take it.”

Gene pushes her string beans away from her mashed potato. “I dunno if I want that anymore,” she admits, pressing the tines of her fork into the mash. “I don’t feel as happy about the news as I thought I would.”

There’s a beat of silence, during which Gene keeps her eyes fixedly and firmly on the mess she’s making on her plate. Then her grandpa sighs, and his hand comes across the table to touch the back of hers. At the touch, Gene covers her face with her other hand, and lets her fork drop to the plate. There’s some unknowable feeling well up beneath her breastbone; one which feels almost like tears, for how her throat aches. 

“You’ve gotta do what you think is good for future-you,” he says, as Gene lets her hand unfurl into his. “Don’t think of your old grandpa, or your friends here. If you want that job, you go to that interview. And if you don’t feel ready, well,” he squeezes her hand. “There’s always gonna be jobs, Genie. It’s not your last chance.”

Behind her hand, Gene can feel her eyes are wet. She doesn’t know the last time she held her grandpa’s hand. When she was a little girl, probably. It’s surprising, how comforting a gesture it can be. “I wanted to be out of this place so _bad_ ,” she groans, and her grandpa laughs. Despite her wet eyes, Gene smiles too. “I dunno what’s changed.”

“Guess it’s grown on you, huh?”

Gene thinks of the view from Merriell’s porch, the quiet lushness of the trails, the easy friendliness of the people. Small town sleepiness, still mornings and warm nights. The hushed silence of the library. The way the mural on Merriell’s wall seems to glow in the darkness of night. Miss September, Miss May, Miss February, the chatter of that damn gameshow. Gene remembers what she’d thought of Sytwell when she’d first arrived back. Dusty, like an old diorama left to decay. A place that once the hazy childhood nostalgia was wiped away, showed cracks, rotting foundations, ceilings ready to cave in. 

Her grandpa is clearing the plates away. Scraping Gene’s untouched dinner into the trash, and asking, “How about I make you a grilled cheese?” in such a gentle way that Gene feels her throat start to ache again. 

She swallows against it, and croaks, “Yeah, that’d be perfect.” Watches him lift a frying pan down from the pot rack, watches him pace from the fridge to the counter. The _clickclickclick_ of the pilot light, and then the soft _whoosh_ of flame. The email sits like a tangible weight in her back pocket. The small kitchen awash with warm summer evening light.

Across town, Gene knows Merriell is doing the same. Sat in her cluttered yellow kitchen, crosslegged on the counter, probably. Eating, or smoking. Reading a book, or on her phone. Fresh from the shower, or still dirty from work. The sprouting scallions in their cloudy water her countertop companions. 

“Birmingham’s pretty far,” Gene says, to the quiet kitchen. At the stove, her grandpa huffs.

“S’pose it is.” 

Gene spreads her hands flat on the table, and looks at them. Red knuckles, picked cuticles. A curved scar from some childhood incident, dark against her freckly skin. “And the pay ain’t so good.”

“No?” His tone is amused, and curious. “Well, you can’t have that.”

“No,” Gene says, absently, and glances up from her hands to catch him smiling down at the sandwich he’s assembling. She snorts, and shakes her head, then props her chin on her palm to watch him cook. The sizzle of the buttered bread into the hot pan, and then the sound of it frying, of the cheese melting over the sides and meeting the pan. The room fills with the smell of it, and for the first time in days, Gene is hungry.

————

Gene turns the question of her possible-employment over in her head for days. Sometimes she manages to convince herself that it’s ridiculous that she’s even considering turning the interview down, that she’s an idiot for not replying immediately and dealing with the fallout after the fact. Sometimes she gets halfway to typing out, _thank you for the offer but —_ before she has to close the tab for fear of sending it. Gene’s email inbox is full of drafts; both accepting and rejecting the interview. If she leaves it much longer, they’ll pull the offer themselves. 

Her uncertainty just won’t resolve itself. She’s even been avoiding Merriell over it, to the other girl’s obvious confusion. On Monday they had texted, briefly, and hung out at Dukes’ while Merriell talked to Burgie and Gene silently fretted. Since then, Gene hasn’t seen her or heard from her, save for a single text send mid-afternoon on Thursday. 

_Still on for friday’s run?_

Now, Gene types out, _yes, of course_ , and sends it. Then types, _i’m sorry for being so —_ only she can’t work out what she’s exactly being like so she deletes that one. Then she gets nervous that Merriell might’ve seen the dots of her hastily-deleted reply bouncing around, and adds, _i miss you_ before remembering that Merriell owns a Nokia, which wouldn’t even be able to comprehend live replies. The whole thing leaves Gene groaning into her hands, hidden away in the break room pretending to eat lunch. 

Merriell, to her credit, sends back: _ha ha_ , and then, _miss you too_ , which makes Gene feel a little less like dying of embarrassment. Only a little.

Gene has vague plans to finally come to a solid conclusion with this whole interview thing by the time Merriell comes over, but Friday morning races up quicker than she could predict. By the time Gene hears Merriell’s knock on the door, she’s none the wiser about what path of action she’s gonna take. Her head hurts, her heart hurts; she feels confused and twisted up and completely unready to see Merriell, who Gene can hear talking to Grandpa in the hall.

“Well, Gene said I can’t run in boots so…” And they laugh, the sound carrying through the hall. “First thing I’ve bought that ain’t food or smokes in years.”

Gene lingers in her room, listening to them. Willing herself to act normal once she steps out of her bedroom to join them. She might not have made up her mind last night, on what direction she’s gonna take with her future, but she did decide one thing. If she chose to accept the offer, she was gonna tell Merriell about it first. It only feels right, after all.

Merriell grins at her when Gene finally emerges, her heavy-lidded eyes giving her a sleepy, cat-like look with her smile. “Now who’s the late one?” she quips, and Gene snorts, as she joins them at the door.

“Still you,” she mutters, resolutely not catching the look she can sense her grandpa trying to send her over Merriell’s head. Instead, she keeps her eyes on Merriell, who is watching her closely, curiously. Something unreadable tucked away in the line of her mouth. “Shall we go?” Gene urges, as silence stretches, and she becomes more and more self conscious.

Merriell’s eyes narrow, her smile growing. “Let’s get going.”

They barely make it to the end of the street before Merriell is slowing to a walk, and jabbing her bony elbow into Gene’s ribs. 

“Ouch,” Gene says, and swerves away. “You know, Merriell, the point of a run is to _run_.”

Merriell ignores her, and does it again. “Somethin’ on your mind?” she asks, though Gene knows its not really a question. Briefly, she wonders at the point at which Merriell had become such a good read of her. Will Gene ever become a good read on her?

“Just the usual,” she mutters, grateful for Merriell’s slow pace keeping her from seeing Gene’s expression fully. There’s a long beat of silence, in which Gene considers slowing to a walk too, considers letting Merriell eke the truth out of her, but then Merriell starts running again and the moment is lost. Left in their dust as they jog from the road to the cool dimness of the trails, and their footsteps become muffled from the earth underfoot.

Merriell’s becoming better at distance; she can go longer without stopping, or slowing now. It means that Gene has more time to get embroiled into her thoughts, as they run in companionable silence. More time to go back and forth on her decision, just as she’s been doing for days. It’s dizzying. Despite her conversation with Grandpa earlier in the week, Gene still can’t settle on a conclusion long enough for her to carry it through. And part of her knows that talking to Merriell would help her, but a bigger part is hesitant, remembering too easily the way Merriell had frozen up over the mere intention of her moving away one day. It’s a hard thing to forget.

The trail they take winds them deep into the woods; Gene in front, Merriell panting away behind. The thump of their feet against the ground. The healthy ache of exertion in Gene’s legs. The longer they run, the more she feels her head begin to clear. It always does. But aren’t the things which clear your head always so easy to avoid? Now she feels good, blood pumping, thinking idly about running routes in Birmingham. They won’t be as good as this one. Not as deserted, surely. And she’s gotten so accustomed to running with Merriell that running without her will be an adjustment. Though, Gene supposes it’ll all be an adjustment, every single facet of it, and look at her acting as if she’s already gotten the job, as if she —

“Ugh,” Merriell says, from behind. Sounding breathless, and tired. “Break?” 

Gratefully, Gene pulls herself away from that particular line of thought, and slows. Together, they walk side-by-side along the path, both breathing fast, wiping sweat from their eyes. Merriell’s cute in her running shorts, with her hair escaping its knot at the crown of her head. Curling wild and wispy around her sweaty face. When she notices Gene looking, she huffs over-exaggeratedly, and bugs her eyes to make Gene laugh.

They end up cutting their run short, or at least, semi-short. The way the canopy overhead seems to trap the heat makes it feel as though Gene’s running through soup; part of her can’t wait for the seasons to turn, for Alabama to relent in this hazy, sticky summer that just keeps going on and on. Their half run leaves them both red-faced, sweating, taking a detour from their usual route to find the pool they normally soak their feet in at the end. 

The break in the trees over the water makes it seem brighter, sunnier, after the vague gloom of the woods. The water catching the sun, and bouncing it back up to ripple pale gold against the rocks, against the bank, against Merriell’s thighs as she steps into it. Her sneakers and socks abandoned to the rocky shore, feet pale under the water, slipping on the slick, mossy stones. Gene doesn’t follow her in. Just strips her own shoes and socks off and dips her feet into the water. 

“It’s cold,” Merriell tells her, and her voice seems to bounce around the small clearing. Ricocheting off the trees, off the large flat stones they sometimes sun themselves on, like lizards. Gene hugs her knees to her chest, and watches the water. The sunlight glancing off the stop, the cool brownish rush of it. Some kids must’ve been down there a couple days ago; a long pile of rocks dams the river at its narrowest point, leaving the water to find the cracks between. Gene and her brother used to do the same thing. Fingers gritty with sandy mud, packing it into all the nooks and crannies, frustrated by the fact that no matter how hard they tried, the water would always find a way to make it through.

Merriell is crouching by it. Leg hair wet and stuck to her, skin made pale by the reflection of the sun on the water. As Gene watches, she fishes under the water for a stone, and then transfers it to a high point on the makeshift dam. And then another, and another, until Gene is lifting her chin from her knees to ask, “You used to do that too, as a kid?”

Merriell presses her cheek to her shoulder to glance at Gene. “Sure.” There’s a smile playing around her mouth. “Me and George — my biggest brother. We weren’t very good at it.”

Gene huffs, hiding her smile in her knees. “Is anyone ever?”

Merriell shrugs, and turns back to her task. “I guess dam builders are. And beavers.”

“Right,” Gene says, and laughs, shakes her head. “Of course.”

A breeze stirs the trees; ripples the surface of the water, and catches in Merriell’s heat-frizzed hair. Gene smiles to herself, resting her cheek to her forearm as she watches Merriell balance another rock amongst the others. It’s the little, quiet moments like this which make her so happy, especially when set against this backdrop. Gene’s always loved the trails, ever since she got lost in them for so long as a child. They’re the best part. She supposes that’d be her answer, to Merriell’s long-asked question. _What, you think it ain’t got charm?_

Sytwell has charm. Gene thinks she just wasn’t in the right place to see it for what it was, back then. It’s hard to appreciate a place that you resent. But she never had anything against Sytwell, really. It was just an easy target for all her frustrations at herself. So what makes it different now? What has changed, to make it easy for her to watch Merriell in the water and feel affection for the town that she’s in, that she grew up in? The idea of staying here used to make her breathless, in the worst kind of way. And now? Well, she’s less sure.

“Merriell,” she says, the words pushed out of her by a sudden surge of bravery. “I’ve gotta tell you somethin’.” Gene doesn’t know where the bravery had come from, or what had propelled it forward, but here she is. Merriell’s huge, green eyes on her, straightening up from her crouch as her expression fades to something curious. 

“Yeah?” she asks. “Shoot.”

And Gene panics, briefly. Because what was it that she was gonna say? The interview, the job, the moving away; the stony silence that would follow. Or, something else? 

Merriell looks sweet, in the sunlight. It catches in her hair, in her jewellery. The curve of her cheekbone, those pretty wide-set eyes. And Gene imagines weekends without a drink at Dukes, she imagines weekdays without sporadic dinners at that horrible diner Merriell loves so much. She imagines running alone, she imagines sleeping alone, she imagines fitting into a new place without sleepy mornings, hot afternoons, the background noise of her grandpa’s war docs, and the fox in the empty lot behind the house —

“What is it, Gene?” Merriell prompts. A frown creasing her brow, as she wanders closer to come take a seat by Gene’s side. Her arm presses against Gene’s; bare skin to bare skin. Warm. Comforting.

Audibly, something slots into place. Gene squeezes her calves, feels the prickle of her leg hair to her palms, and says, “I’m —” Her eyes flick to the forest, the Merriell’s face, to the gold-dust surface of the water. The shiny-wet stones of the makeshift dam, the water leaking irrevocably through. She says, “I’m thinking of cooking lasagne tonight. Wanna help me and Grandpa eat it?”

Merriell smiles at her, quizzically. The sun lighting her up from above. “That’s what you wanted to say?” she asks. This close, Gene can see the pale freckles smattered across the bridge of her nose. Can see every micro-expression; the tiniest twitch of her brows. Two lines popping up between them. Concern. 

Gene swallows, and she commits to it. Slings an arm around Merriell’s shoulders, a smile creeping unbidden across her face as Merriell snorts, and tucks her face into Gene’s neck. Affection blooming as warm as the sunlight on the crown of her head. She needs longer at this. She _wants_ more time with this. Not just Merriell, but — all of it. Coming to terms with a life on pause; coming to terms with a life that isn’t quite unfolding the way she thought it might. Both in good ways and not so good ways. Gene of a year ago could never have imagined any of this; blossoming relationship included. Parts of it make her feel warm. Parts make her feel cold. But if Sytwell grew on her, given the chance, anything could change. 

“Gene?” Merriell prompts, leaning just far enough back that she can look at her. Gene grins at her.

“Yeah, sure,” she says. “What else would it be?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey, thank you so so much for reading!! this started life as one of those high concept low actual-ideas fics i always seem to get myself wrapped up in, and really thought it'd be so niche (within the niche that is the pacific itself lol) that basically like, maybe one other person would read it haha. so thank you so much for reading, for leaving kudos, and comments, and bookmarking :~) finishing a longfic is always such a weird feeling, but i'm pretty happy with this fic as a whole and even happier than it seems to resonate with some of you :~~~) thanks again!!


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